Taking out the garbage

This entry was originally posted on 11 March 2004 at 2:23 p.m.

During my junior and senior years of college, i worked the late shift at the convenience store over on Busch Campus. We went through a series of managers while i was there. There was Peter, who was kind of a dreamer and wanted to go to graduate school for philosophy; Rey, who had been in the Navy or Marines (i forget which, but he'd been stationed on a ship) and was methodical, organized, and very strict; one guy, an out gay man whose name i can't remember but whose face is burned into my memory; and a girl about my age, whose name i also forget, who was bipolar and applying to Cooper Union during a sort of weird hypomanic state that was slowly creeping into full-blown mania.

One of the tasks i enjoyed the most at that job was taking out the trash. There was a gigantic (think eighteen-wheeler-sized) trash compactor outside the store; we'd fill one of those big, wheeled US Postal Service mail bins with all the trash bags from the shop and office, push the bin outside, toss all of the bags into the trash compactor, and run the machine. I loved it. I was in a pretty bad state psychologically back then, and taking out the trash afforded me respite from having to deal with customers under the shop's harsh lights, from all of the inadequacies and shortcomings and horrible things that were lurking in me.

It also gave me the chance to do a little daydreaming. I've always had an overactive imagination; for me, a walk down the street is usually much more. There's almost always some fantasy lying beneath my actions, some little daydream that i'm walking through while i carry out my tasks, something to keep me interested in what i'm doing. If i'm riding public transit, it's in some other world, where the subway trains are really giant worms with carriages strapped to their backs; if i'm driving to New Jersey, in my fantasy i'm piloting a little scout craft over an alien world; if i'm writing SPSS code on our UNIX system, i'm really typing in commands that control robots on some clandestine pirate mission. I'm just weird that way. Always have been, always will be, and i wouldn't have it any other way.

When i took out the trash, it was usually cold and dark outside, the sky full of stars, and the landscape Maritan-bleak. In my mind, when i took out the trash, it was on a little colony on some cold, dark, barren planetoid, where the few hardy survivors had already gone to sleep for the night. Maybe this says something about how i was feeling in general back then, but i look back on that little daydream with some fondness.

One night after i'd taken out the trash, the manager on duty--the artist (who eventually borrowed my copy of A Buddhist Bible and never returned it despite the fact that she'd had to stop reading it because she'd begun to believe she was the Buddha...) stopped me. "I know why you like taking out the trash," she said with a conspiratorial edge to her voice.

I tried not to furrow my brow. "And why is that," i asked.

"You like it for the same reason that I do: you like the smell, the reek of all that creation." She went on for a moment about how the smell of the garbage was symbolic of humanity, of all its virtues and failures. I wish i could remember exactly how she had phrased it, but there was a sense of completeness to her words, a sense that she was talking not about refuse, but about gold.

I listened to her words and understood that she was talking about something in herself, not something in me. And although she was wrong, i didn't correct her. I couldn't bear to tell her the truth; it felt too private, too vulnerable.

I wonder whatever happened to her.