Consider Landfills For Your Honeymoon Spot: Reflections on Trash and Trash Byproducts (not you)

Rude Chicken Explores Trash, Landfills, and Tough Foot Skin With Panache and 13% Post Consumer Recycled Poultry Product.

Photo by Shannon Kunkle on Unsplash

Landfills are like cultural Alzheimer’s for us folk. Take trash, throw away trash, pick up trash in giant surprisingly well contained vehicles, sort trash, and eventually slop our gathered slop away in a hole, and then layer tons of dirt on top of it. Stick few non paper straws in it and let it sit for awhile until enough people forget, then build a housing development on it with water that shall eternally faintly smell and taste like canned beef stroganoff from 1974.

Though I am a particularly over bold and commonly brave to my own detriment kind of Chicken, this doesn’t really bother me, after all, what else IS dirt good for? If the good Lord didn’t want us to bury things, then the good Lord shouldn’t have given us dirt. See the Entry on sandcastles, which I haven’t written yet, but when I do I can assure you it would behoove you to remember this entry. But what are our other options?

Burn it? So we can have the air quality of mango chutney? I guess, we already do this, but what if we did it more? Like China, until they didn’t, and when they didn’t they really didn’t. But they once did a lot more, and it was gross.

Recycle it? This would only work if we actually committed to it fully, which humans, never commit to anything fully. Except maybe war and finding flatulence funny, and those that make the ludicrous claim that they don’t, are broken people who deserve our collective pity, and maybe scorn depending on the severity of their individual severity. But on recycling, we make plastic that isn’t designed to be recycled. We make disposable things purposefully undisposable. Why would we do this other than self sabotaging pettiness?

Composting? I guess, but who would we hire to go and rake the compost? I mean... yea people would do it, but no one wants to pay them the wage to make that job make sense. Shit we haven’t upped the minimum wage since literally 2009, and you think some waste management company is going to pay people something decent to rake our gathered okra trimmings and kumquat seeds? Nah. Especially not when you risk getting lit on fire. Not even compost likes composting, cause if you do it right, the shit self immolates. Like its taking the ultimate form of protest against itself, and you want to suggest this as a valid idea? And hire poor Ralph to go rake it for $7.25 and make him a martyr?

If you’re in a rich country you could pay other countries to buy it, yea we do that already. Think about how stupid that is. Sending great barges of absolutely loaded pampers across the Atlantic to some other place to... sit there. I lack the sophistication to explain why its wrong, but the idea of a pile of baby poop packed diapers hanging around a palm tree is existentially depressing, and you handing me a ten spot doesn’t make me feel better.

So lets go back home right? Where we can take our shoes off, put on some Duck tales reruns and pop out some pizza rolls and an ecto cooler juice box to make life seem better. Easy enough, Pizza rolls come in cardboard boxes too, which biodegrade themselves if you throw them in a hot shower for long enough, plus pro tip: showering in mushy cardboard is great for softening that tough feet skin. Then you throw out the juice box and go about your day.

Throw that juice box right on out, into your kitchen standard 13 gallon trash can, with no lid, or one of those swishy lids that no one ever likes to touch since its delicately fondled everything the family has thrown out for the past forever since it was purchased at your generic big box store. Leaving even accidental touches feel like a def con 5 event. Which was terrible, but it was good terrible. Like how skinning your knees on pavement, slamming your nuts on the crossbar of a bike, or accidentally getting a 3am mouthful of spoiled milk when you zombie walk to the kitchen and drink from the carton, all serve to make you more ready for life, and give needed perspective.

Until some well intentioned gong farmer decided to invent the laziest invention beyond the bidet. For 4 AA batteries, you too can not touch the sins of your past, the automatic trash can lid. The sensor detects you, it opens, you drop your trash in, it closes. Seems so simple, so innocent, yet that is exactly why its so insidious. No step lever, no secretly disgusting swishy cover, just cold efficiency. That makes you less as a person. One that Celine Dion would never sing about.

It doesn’t make your house better! It makes it a silken vortex straight to mediocrity. The dog and Grandma can still get into it, now you owe it a monthly battery tithe, and the only blessing you get is some meager ration of ridiculous self satisfaction that you’re better than someone else. That’s not even a valid soap box, its a shitty cardboard Lever 2000 soap box, that biodegrades in the shower equally shittily. Or even better, it gets slow, or the sensor breaks like everything else these days. So now you’re trying to toss your Totino’s pizza roll box away and instead of doing it’s job, it now makes you wait for it.

You just wanna toss your trash, meanwhile you’re forced to make awkward eye contact with it while you wait a gilded age for the lid to take its sweet time opening, when if you had just sacked up (metaphorically for the ladies present) you coulda thrown it into the rancor pit in the kitchen and went on about your day without any karmic guilt as your companion for the rest of the day.

For future reference: Check your local ordinances. Get a burn pit in the backyard.

Or a bigger shower.

-RC