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TAKING OUT THE TRASH
We are all becoming a little bit strange in our street. There is a pass the parcel game of personal histories going on and we are not in control of it. We have been jumbled up and we may forget who we are because we have lost touch with who we were yesterday. There is no panic yet but there is just a hint of gathering concern. Who knows, before long there could be civil unrest, pandemonium, riots.
It started early this morning. The seeds of discomfort were sewn just as many had left for work, were hanging out washing, reading the morning paper. While we were in our homes, in our gardens or on our way to work, men in blue came and set the time bomb a-ticking. Were they spies from the FBI? No one in our street has said it yet but, cowering behind our curtains, we have all started to think it.
These men in blue, they came and they took away our rubbish in a big noisy lorry with a crushing thing on the back. They emptied our big grey plastic dustbins into their lorry and drove away. They drove away and all our dustbins got jumbled. Maybe the blue men jumbled them before they left, or maybe it was something more sinister. Elves? No one will say that either, or pixies, but there is certain magic in our mayhem.
Well now, it was evening before the mix up was discovered and now we all have a problem. Through the day we have fed new rubbish to our plastic dustbins, in good faith, believing they were the same friends they had always been. But no, some of my rubbish went into number 18’s bin but they don’t have my bin, so now she has my rubbish and I have a mystery bin with some of her rubbish in it and tomorrow I will have to try to trade this bin of unknown origin in order to get my own bin back. But whose rubbish will be in it?
Now, never mind the blue bin men, they have been and gone, the worry is these men in grey suits you hear about. What if they were to turn up now and demand to see our rubbish? There we would stand, in our front gardens, with the contents of someone else’s dustbin laid out in front of us. Would the suit boys listen to our protestations about a mix-up? Both you and I know they would not. There we would stand, guilty of each other’s crimes, while the men picked through each scrap of discordant discard with the ends of their pencils, pulling inscrutable faces and writing everything down in their little black notepads.
Someone, somewhere down our street will have to bear the unjust shame of organic wrappings, another may suffer the miscarriage of empty pack upon pack of pop tarts, pot noodles. But here’s the issue, what the hell is in my misplaced bin out there? Out in the moonlight this unknown entity holds a piece of someone’s yesterday and it’s pretending to be mine. The little grey obelisk in the moonlight in my front garden is no longer my friend. He is a cuckoo in our nest and we can only fear what dread is secreted in his belly.
And, out there too, somewhere, is my bin, gobbling up someone else’s history. The dilemma in our street is growing with each new discard. We can’t stop, we can’t help ourselves, friend or foe we have to feed these wide-mouth monsters. That is what my bin is probably doing right now and it’s very unsettling.
Anyway, when you think about it, put it into some kind of context, despite the anguish, despite the turmoil, it comes down to one question: How could he do it to us?
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