| Clean
Living in
the Great Midwest
July 21, 2005 Every once in a while I will stop what I am doing and look around at the scenery. Maybe I’ll check out a sunset or perhaps a particular landscape or something else that big tough guys aren’t supposed to notice. I secretly stand in awe of the beautiful things around me. Within a matter of milliseconds my brain starts to turn these images into stupid questions. One of the first questions has always been, “Okay, just looking around I can see about a thousand different animals. That tree over there is full of birds. I can see squirrels, rabbits…all sorts of critters. How ‘come none of them ever fall over dead of a heart attack or something? There are millions of nocturnal creatures living within a radius of a few miles of where I’m standing. Just considering the numbers – why aren’t the streets and sidewalks littered with animal corpses?” I’ve heard explanations about animals knowing when it’s their time and going someplace far away to be alone when they expire. I’ve also been told that the circle of life causes them to be devoured by insects or smaller animals before I get a chance to see them. The skeptic in me has never really completely bought any of these explanations. Yet unless they are run over by a car, or the family dog gets to them, I never see any dead animals. Rather than hurting myself in an attempt to figure it out, I’ve always just been glad that whomever created this whole place thought of a way to keep me from having to shovel animal carcasses out of my path to work and the liquor store. Until two days ago… If the sanitation worker has a natural enemy, it must be the trash can lid. I have never in my life seen so much anger taken out on an inanimate object. I have repeatedly come home from work on garbage day to see my trash can lids stomped on, turned inside out and thrown across my front lawn and against my house’s cobblestone facade like some sort of Rubbermade Olympic discus. It’s as though the CEO of the trash can lid company wakes up every morning, strolls down to the trash company and then proceeds to kick each and every trash collector in the nuts. I can’t think of any other action that could make a person so angry that they would take another person’s property, stomp on it a few times, carry it down to the end of the street and then throw it onto the train tracks so that it could become one with the engine’s cow-catcher on a one-way freight run to Denver. At least that’s what I think happened to my missing trash can lids. So anyway, trash cans are expensive – and you just can’t go and buy a lid. You have to buy a whole new can. Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if Wal-Mart put the trash collectors up to the whole lid-vandalism thing just to move a few more trash cans every month. According to a guy I know who used to own a sorting goods store, Wal-Mart is behind every dirty scheme. Anyway, I decided that I wasn’t going to plop down $20+ every time some sanitation worker decides to use my trash can lid as a stress-relieving Frisbee. As far as I was concerned, the damn things could go lidless. I’d teach those douchbags a thing or two – if they don’t like my lids, they can help themselves to a can full of dirty diaper-filtered rainwater…fuckers. Everything worked out beautifully for a few weeks after that. The lack of lids turned out to be a really sweet deal. The way my kitchen is set up allowed me to simply tie up the trash bag, open the window, pull up the screen and drop the bag into the open can. No more walking outside for me! The act of taking out the trash went from a smelly and undesirable undertaking to an exercise in chucking shit out the window. I decided that when it was time to go out and buy new trash cans, I was going to hurl the new lids onto the train tracks myself. Why should the trash collectors have all the fun? We were a lidless family from that moment on. Until two days ago… I was helping my kids pretend to drive the car when my wife came running around the corner and shot me that look that says, “You’d better get over here right fucking now!!!” My kids and I pretend stopped the car and shifted into pretend park. We shut off the pretend engine and got out so that we could go figure out what was causing her to freak out so bad. The conversation went something like this: “Hey hon, what’s the matter?” “Did you put something furry and dead into the trash can?!” “Where would I get something that was furry and dead?” “How the fuck should I know?! There’s something furry and dead in the trash can!!!” “What is it?” “If I knew what it fucking was, I wouldn’t be referring to it as the fucking furry and dead thing, now would I?!” “How do you know it’s dead?” “Because it’s not moving, it smells like a dead animal and there are flies all over the thing!!! Are you going to fucking go and look at it or not?!” “Sounds kinda gross.” I slowly walked toward the cans, cursing whoever the fuck it was that invented gender roles. When I got there, I finally began to smell it. There were flies buzzing about as though they had found the world’s largest pile of shit. True enough, whatever it was had died some time ago. I peeked into the can like some sort of critter coroner and decided that the animal was a possum, and that it had died of natural causes. Strangely enough, it had been dining on McDonald’s leftovers when it expired. Its little heart must’ve just had more than it could take. I told the wife to go back into the house and that I would take care of it. Like the big brave man that I am, I followed her into the house, picked up the phone, and called the friendly folks at Animal Control. They are required to pick up possums and other rodents when a citizen requests. Despite the fact that they are required to pick up possums and other rodents when a citizen requests, they didn’t feel like it that day and the possum was subjected to a day in a trash can, on my front lawn, in the July heat that is Kansas City. I was pretty pissed at first when I came home and saw that a local government office might not be as good as their word, but I came to the conclusion that this cloud had a silver lining…tomorrow was trash day. I would just set a bag of recently fudged Huggies on top of what was left of my little rotting buddy and let the people who caused all of this in the first place deal with it. But I couldn’t pull the trigger. I pictured a sanitation worker finding what was left of the little guy, getting pissed and then screaming at my wife while I sat safely at work. I got up out of bed, picked up an entire box of industrial-strength garbage bags and poured my possum friend into a bag. Then I put the other bag into another bag. Then I put those two bags into a final bag. Then I walked down to the end of the street and chucked the bags onto the train tracks. I hope my new dead possum friend likes it in Denver… Love, JRM Comments to metten0@lycos.com |
