The Trash Experience

Being the trashman.

Editor’s Note: I am going on vacation once again, but this Yelp review was written in 2019. I wanted to get it to you. There is nothing on the internet that shows a picture of the sheer masculine joy of tossing heavy crap out of the back of a truck. Plus I did it with my son. I still smile thinking about it.

March 2019
This isn't about them being a trashman, it's about me being a trashman. You see I didn't call Republic Services to come pick up my icky unwanteds, I called them to find out where I could dump them myself. I got an address in Compton, I took a UHaul truck full of trash, garbage, old furniture and a 12 year old flat screen that I paid 1400 for.

There's nothing weirder than being parked in line between two garbage trucks. That's what I did for about 15 minutes at the West gate of the facility in Compton. When it was my turn, I pulled up my truck onto the scale (whoo a little bouncy there) got out and talked to the man in the booth. He told me that it costs 115 per ton to dump my stuff, asked me what I had to get rid of and directed me to a lane in the yard.

I have never been to a landfill or a dump, but I have fed pigs. This dump does not smell as bad as a pig sty, which isn't saying much. Basically it smells like old garbage, and of course there are gulls crawling all over the place. There is a giant concrete structure with 6 lanes. Garbage trucks are in the noisy process of dumping their contents and somewhere in the huge pit below, a bulldozer roars and scrapes. Finally the boss directs me over to lane six and says dump it here. I'm a little hesitant because all I can see is a huge pile of old mattresses. Dude, I have wood and steel.

I put on my gloves and my son and I start tossing junk out of the back of the 17 foot UHaul truck into a growing mess behind it. I gotta tell you it's a manly feeling to watch an old bookcase split into pieces when you give it the heave ho onto the concrete. It's all noise and destruction. And stink. Yeah lots of stink too. We had gloves but not masks. Despite the smell, and perhaps because of it, I experienced a kind of bourgeois cleansing watching that old Samsung get dashed to bits.

It took about 10 minutes to send about 1000 pounds of junk to wherever it goes from here. I tell you it's quite an invigorating bit of exercise. We weighed out and got our receipt. Man that was fun.

Where your garbage truck goes.

October 2023
Ever since the debut of Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs, not to mention Deadliest Catch, I have reignited my proper boyhood dreams. I’ve always liked to be the man who got things done. It’s hard to see that inserted into the dreams of proper boys these days. I did get my son, who went Navy, The Dangerous Book for Boys. You can still get a copy on Amazon, but Abebooks and Alibris are my treasures these days - even though I’m subscribed to Audible.

Nevertheless I have been thinking a bit about how and and when I began my Martial Education, and the philosophical part of that asks the question, “What it the proper use of your physical fitness?” The answer isn’t exactly sacrifice, but it is risk. Risk for others. You taking the hit for people who cannot accomplish some necessary physical feat on their own. It’s a very difficult virtue to sustain in a world where Genius companies rent out API access to their AI brain, and mediocre plutocrats wrap that into a pretty UI and sell it to the attention economy. I can’t tell you how much Reddit and TikTok are to be believed, but there’s a lot of young men performing stupid stunts with their bodies, and it ain’t for blue collar dollars. Then again, some smart entity knows that I like watching fail videos. Such content is pushed upon me. Now.

It therefore stands to reason that a fair amount of masculine energy is taken for granted as irrational when you’re performing for a class of affluent people with few or no experiences performing muscle-straining dirty work. I am thinking about this as I consider the sorts of people who are enjoying messaging each other moralistic assessments of the physical work of combat taking place half a globe away. Of course they can only see ideological duty. How could they possibly understand the joy of destroying what is unwanted - despite the despicable choices given them? This is inherently human, yes, but the thinking behind the utility of such work is what must bear the most scrutiny, not the actions themselves. War is psychologically what we do. We’re territorial. We’re possessive. We’re aggressive.

Still, there is joy in throwing trash away. Sometimes our thinking gets so twisted that we imagine other people to be trash, and this is the sort of reasoning that those who unconditionally oppose war are led to believe is unconditionally the case. The same belief animates activism to defund police forces. They see violent fidelity to an ideological duty that dictates such evil notions that “Brown people are trash”, or “Jews are genocidal”. I talked about this before. That is not hatred, it is disgust. The reasonable man who is disgusted will be patient as he comes up with a plan to rid that thing he is disgusted with from the face of the Earth. To view the combat of war with disgust it to make that fatal error. The disgusted conflate their own disgust with putative ideological motivations of the combatants. Sometimes they are halfway right, but there are more often devilish geopolitical details which require a more sober evaluation.

This is why I find it so stunning that the very blatant statements of many political players in this particular conflict are ignored. Take people at their words. Nevertheless I am not going to be a scholar squirrel on this matter and cite Hamas or Alawite Saudis on their documented statements about the failures to eliminate either population.

I remain sure that the application of physical skills of facing uncertainty, of bravery would be sufficient to change those unconditional convictions. In other words it’s altogether to easy to armchair quarterback a war. I hope not to consider this conflict much longer in the context of the performative gyrations we Americans with disposable time use against each other. There is military history in the making.