exciting morning

on my way to work, i was briefly stuck in traffic because a psycho the police had chased all the way from the east bay at 100mph had stopped in the middle of 101 and doused himself with gasoline. they were diverting all traffic off the highway for a while.

fortunately, by the time i hit the blockage they'd subdued him and got him out of the road, so i was only stuck for a few minutes. i missed being diverted by about 20 minutes. had i not been running late, i'd have been stuck for an hour or so and ended up getting to work around the same time i did anyway.

this is going to be one of those days, isn't it? one of those days when bad things happen, but i mysteriously miss them by mere moments.

one man's trash...

so i have a lot of junk lying around. a dead laptop, a falling-apart laptop, some 30 year old broken electric clocks, a mostly-functional but orphaned and unreliable printer, an ancient serial terminal, a weight bench i never took out of the box and weights to go with it... you know the sort of thing.

every time i talk about tossing some of this stuff, people start insisting i do something else with it. waider wants me to ship the falling-apart laptop (which is missing a key, overheats if you put the battery in, and is held in a usable position by tape because the hinges are completely broken) to him in Ireland -- yes, Ireland -- so he can give it to his brother. someone else wants the serial terminal, but since he's actually local i don't mind putting it in the car and driving it over to his place. i'll donate the printer to charity since it's still perfectly usable assuming you don't look at it the wrong way. one day i'll advertise the weight bench on craigslist, free to anyone willing to move the weights herself.

i'm still not sure it's worth the trouble to ship an unreliable, rapidly disintegrating laptop to the other side of the planet. i think waider needs to spend a few bucks more for something his brother can actually carry around without handling it like eggs. i'll find out where one sends dead laptops, and send them the truly broken one at a minimum.

but then there are the broken clocks. now, these clocks are cheap electric clocks, about 30 years old, about 4" square, and were once quite nifty-looking. when i bought them they were already old and beat up, although still moderately nifty-looking, and neither worked reliably. now they don't work at all. and a few minutes ago, several people tried to convince me that it is my moral duty to take these broken clocks and donate them somewhere so they won't end up sitting in a landfill. and the more i think about it, the more preposterous i find this idea.

how long, exactly, is one required to keep an object in circulation? they're not recyclable. they might be fixable, but honestly, they weren't worth the $10 each or so i paid for them when i bought them, and they're sure as hell not worth that now. who, exactly, desperately wants broken, 30 year old electric clocks? it would be insulting to donate them to charity. i suppose i could take them to an antique store, but again, they're broken, so it hardly seems worth the effort, especially considering that i've been driving around with my car trunk filled with books i mean to sell for over a year and haven't got round to it yet. besides, last i checked, most antique dealers really weren't very interested in broken worthless junk. i hear that an artist i know might have use for some of the parts in art projects, but you know what? even she will throw away the parts she doesn't use.

BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT YOU DO WITH TRASH. YOU THROW IT AWAY.

yes, it would be really nice if we had an alternative to landfills. but we don't. and until we do, i don't feel that it's my personal obligation to save the world by spending my time -- which is currently worth quite a bit, if you go by the hourly rate -- hauling my broken junk around begging people to take it off my hands. and i'm incredibly irritated by the implication that i am a terrible, horrible, awful person for wanting to throw away a couple of objects -- both of which are largely biodegradable, by the way, one being made mostly of wood and the other of tin -- that are of so little value that to spend my time finding someone to take them off my hands would cost me ten times or more in time than they're actually worth.

at what point, pray tell, is it acceptable to throw something away? i recycle my recyclables. i don't get the paper because it's wasteful. i turn off lights in empty rooms and conserve water and don't litter and bought a car that's the next best thing to a hybrid in terms of low emissions. i don't run the A/C in that car much, because it uses more fuel and makes me feel wasteful.

but now, i am to believe it's a reprehensible act to throw away a couple of broken clocks because they'll go into a landfill. i'm such a procrastinator i haven't done my taxes, but i'm meant to waste my space and my time trying to prevent less than a cubic foot of garbage from going into a landfill.

no. just no. this is the sort of nonsense up with which we shall not put. i am drawing my line in the sand right here --> <--. i will do what i reasonably can to be good to the environment, but i will not spend hours driving every object i've ever owned around begging someone to take it off my hands just so i won't have to throw it away.

that's right, i'm the antichrist. i'm satan. i'm probably a republican. i'm certainly a capitalist imperialist running pig-dog tool of the patriarchy. i burn fuzzy kittens for fuel in the winter to run my backyard smog generator. i am personally responsible for the destruction of the rainforests, the loss of animal habitats, and the extinction of the dinosaurs. and no, it wasn't an asteroid that hit the earth all those millennia ago -- it was MY GARBAGE. and you know what? i'd do it again, just to watch them jump out of their skin at the sound of the impact. man, that's top-notch comedy.

and now, if you don't mind, i'm going to go throw away my trash.