Tag: trash

Garbage Dream

I’m outside, kinda young. Rolling deep green grass, where a music festival is due to start. I’m excited about it but worried about unspecified stuff. I’m alone, don’t know anyone there. A few others are starting to arrive. They’re all younger, with my teenagers among them, mostly female.

I’m busy, though, boxing up containers of trash. Collecting it, putting it in boxes, sealing it up. Don’t know why I’m specifically doing it; seems to be a compulsion. People keep arriving but I keep boxing up trash. By the time I’m done, hundreds have arrived, and I have about thirty small, square boxes of trash.

I need a place to put them, and that worries me. I have some of them stacked on a small peeling white trailer which is attached to a small green minibike like one I had in my early teens. I plan to use the bike to pull the trailer and unload the garbage boxes somewhere else, but where?

There is a small white frame house. Single story, white siding, two windows on the front, a screen door in its center. I know that this is the office of the young men organizing the music festival. There are three, dark-haired young white men in their early twenties. I know this without seeing them. I can hear them talking and laughing. Part of their conversation is about me and my minibike pulling the scarred white trailer loaded with boxes of trash.

Piles of trash are not far from the house. I’m thinking about unloading my trash into this collection, but I feel guilty, as if I’m breaking a law, and that holds me back. Yet, racing around, watched by a growing number of people, I can’t find anywhere else to put the trash. I feel like this is my only choice.

Aware that I’m being watched, that others are commenting about what I’m doing, I try pulling my trailer of trash. It won’t go. I reattach the green minibike with its fat knobby tires. The little bike easily tugs the trailer across the way.

From inside the trailer, I hear the organizers discuss this development. One suggest, “It’s alright, let him be.” I feel better about that. I start unloading the trailer. People are commenting about how fast and hard I’m working. Some appreciate that I’ve cleaned up trash. Buoyed by what I hear, I quickly unload the trailer, drive back, and fill it again. Now finished, I stand still, sweating and breathing hard by my little minibike and its empty white trailer.

0

Tuesday’s Wandering Thought

Everyone was worried about putting their trash cans out by the curb the night before pickup because of bears.

But most people’s trash cans are stored by the side of their house. Some are behind wooden fences, no doubt a robust protection against a bear (yeah, that’s snark). A bear can get these cans just as easily there as on the street, waiting for the trash collector. If they’re really concerned about bears getting into trash cans, they need to do a lot more than delay putting them out until the morning.

0

A Coffee Shop Dream

A pleasant and sunny day had emerged. In shorts, I was out walking through some thin woods and arrived at a stone and wood building I knew. Pausing on some steps, I cleaned off my shoes. Cat hair was just coating them. As another couple — strangers — passed, I briefly attempted to explain to them that I was cleaning cat hair off my shoes — but why would it matter to them? Stopping, sitting down, I removed my shoes to better clean them. At last, I continued, in socks, shoes in hand, up into the building.

This was a cozy book store-coffee shop combo. I visited the book store section first. A white male with glasses was behind the counter. I told him I was looking for fiction books. He asked for more details. I then asked, “Do you have a McCall’s? It lists every fiction book ever written.” He went off in search of, then returned with a red book with white lettering.

I moved to the coffee shop. It was a tight place — large counter dominating one corner, a waste can and several small, round tables taking up the rest of maybe a twelve by twelve foot space — and busy. I took a tall chair between two male customers at the counter. The woman behind me was a pale, slender redhead. She said, “Everyone was here dancing last night, Michael. You should have come. You would’ve had a good time.”

I thought I recognized her. She knew me but I didn’t know her name. Stalling, I replied, “Who was everyone?” She began reciting names as I wondered what her name was. Then a large man threw the remains of a scone and hit me in the chest. He began a string of earnest apologies. I realized that he’d been trying to get the scone into the trash can behind me but it was so tight and crowded, he’d instead hit me. It bothered me not at all. I took the scone and turn to put it into the trash.

I struggled. The trash can was carved out of a thick and twisted tree trunk. Two holes were there. An upper one was for recycle and the lower was for the waste. I figured this out along with other people who were attempting to use the trash. We all talked it through out loud. Then, scone dropped in trash, the dream ended.

0

Mash

Mash is the nickname I’ve given the mail the United States Postal Service delivers to my post box. It’s a truncating and combining of two words, as I’m wont to do. In this instance, the two words are mail trash. By my estimate, my mail is ninety percent mash. Two percent is personal, and eight percent is bills.

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑