Instant Karma
This is a story that does not speak well of me, but we all get what we deserve and sometimes we get it within seconds.
We share a very small alley with the neighbors on the next street over. It's very small, too small for a car to share with a bike. Because of its size all the trashcans for houses on both sides of the alley are on our side of the alley, furthermore they're all smooshed together making for a fair simlucra of 17th century Paris: overflowing garbage, rats, smell, water runoff trickling down the middle of the cracked road, unwashed human scavengers eking out a miserable and scant living from the same place they too oft urinate. It's not the worst place in Los Angeles back there, but it's not a place you want to spend a lot of time (though you do get the occassional teenagers smoking pot and copulating).
There one natural resource the alley provides is space to put your refuse. But being such a small alley there's limited space, and complicating matters further is the fact that our city government has decided how many and how big our trashcans should be. Plus the actual trash cans have to share the alley with lawn clipping cans and recycling.
In truth, even with two kids, a dog, two businesses, and major construction we don't generate more trash than we have room for in between collections. Sometimes we do. Sometimes everyone does. After Christmas or a kid's birthday party there's fair amount of overfill going on. When this happens we, and everyone else on the alley, spread it around to various trashcans. We all do it, no one likes it but what are you going to do? You put up with it when people do it to you and you remember that people do it to you when you do it to them.
Some people make a mockery of the system, however. On the other side of the alley a few houses up from ours the people generate loads of trash, which regularly finds its way in our trashcan, the one located most conveniently next to their own. How do I know it's theirs? I've seen their address on many items. Usually there's no problem, but sometimes their abuse of the system has consequences, we regularly are unable to use our own trashcan because it's so full of their stuff. You have to spread it around bitches, it's unneighborly to hog someone else's trash.
So the other day I was throwing some trash out and we'd had a bunch of contractors working on our garage all week and our trash was pretty full. I was going to throw some trash into another can and I looked into the offending neighbors can first (of course) to find that it already had some of our trash in it (some extra floorboards a contractor was installing). It wasn't a huge amount of trash but I felt that fair was fair and although I WANTED to pile on with more trash, I just couldn't in good conscience do it. So I walked down the alley and spread it around.
Last night I was taking out the recycling and I discovered that all the floorboards from their trash had been unceremoniously dumped in front of our own. Okay, given the amount of crap of theirs I'd dealt with over the years this pissed me off. My feelings didn't stop there though, I went from pissed off to vengeful fairly quickly. So as a response I walked to their trash can, removed the topmost bag, and tossed it into the alley. What I hoped to achieve by doing this was to annoy them at the very least; to make them stoop over and pick up their bag of trash. But what I really hoped for was to seriously ruin their day. I hoped a rat would get in it, or a cat (rats by another name), or maybe a car would run over it. In some way, I'd hoped, their trash would scatter all over the alley, and their green guilt would force them to pick it up.
Even as I wished this I felt it was wrong. I felt I should reconsider and put it back in the can. But the momentum of the act took over and I ignored my urge to reconsider.
About one second later I pushed the gate leading to our yard instead of pulling it and locked myself in the alley. Did I mention it was raining? Did I mention I was wearing slippers? I didn't curse my luck, how could I? I knew in my heart that I'd earned a trip to the karmic retribution woodshed; so I picked up their trash and put it back in the can, then trudged around the block in the rain in my sweats and slippers and slid into our kitchen where Julia asked where I'd been.
So there you go. I got what was coming to me. And while I learned a lesson, I'm also going to be strict about what finds it's way into my trash can in the future.
We share a very small alley with the neighbors on the next street over. It's very small, too small for a car to share with a bike. Because of its size all the trashcans for houses on both sides of the alley are on our side of the alley, furthermore they're all smooshed together making for a fair simlucra of 17th century Paris: overflowing garbage, rats, smell, water runoff trickling down the middle of the cracked road, unwashed human scavengers eking out a miserable and scant living from the same place they too oft urinate. It's not the worst place in Los Angeles back there, but it's not a place you want to spend a lot of time (though you do get the occassional teenagers smoking pot and copulating).
There one natural resource the alley provides is space to put your refuse. But being such a small alley there's limited space, and complicating matters further is the fact that our city government has decided how many and how big our trashcans should be. Plus the actual trash cans have to share the alley with lawn clipping cans and recycling.
In truth, even with two kids, a dog, two businesses, and major construction we don't generate more trash than we have room for in between collections. Sometimes we do. Sometimes everyone does. After Christmas or a kid's birthday party there's fair amount of overfill going on. When this happens we, and everyone else on the alley, spread it around to various trashcans. We all do it, no one likes it but what are you going to do? You put up with it when people do it to you and you remember that people do it to you when you do it to them.
Some people make a mockery of the system, however. On the other side of the alley a few houses up from ours the people generate loads of trash, which regularly finds its way in our trashcan, the one located most conveniently next to their own. How do I know it's theirs? I've seen their address on many items. Usually there's no problem, but sometimes their abuse of the system has consequences, we regularly are unable to use our own trashcan because it's so full of their stuff. You have to spread it around bitches, it's unneighborly to hog someone else's trash.
So the other day I was throwing some trash out and we'd had a bunch of contractors working on our garage all week and our trash was pretty full. I was going to throw some trash into another can and I looked into the offending neighbors can first (of course) to find that it already had some of our trash in it (some extra floorboards a contractor was installing). It wasn't a huge amount of trash but I felt that fair was fair and although I WANTED to pile on with more trash, I just couldn't in good conscience do it. So I walked down the alley and spread it around.
Last night I was taking out the recycling and I discovered that all the floorboards from their trash had been unceremoniously dumped in front of our own. Okay, given the amount of crap of theirs I'd dealt with over the years this pissed me off. My feelings didn't stop there though, I went from pissed off to vengeful fairly quickly. So as a response I walked to their trash can, removed the topmost bag, and tossed it into the alley. What I hoped to achieve by doing this was to annoy them at the very least; to make them stoop over and pick up their bag of trash. But what I really hoped for was to seriously ruin their day. I hoped a rat would get in it, or a cat (rats by another name), or maybe a car would run over it. In some way, I'd hoped, their trash would scatter all over the alley, and their green guilt would force them to pick it up.
Even as I wished this I felt it was wrong. I felt I should reconsider and put it back in the can. But the momentum of the act took over and I ignored my urge to reconsider.
About one second later I pushed the gate leading to our yard instead of pulling it and locked myself in the alley. Did I mention it was raining? Did I mention I was wearing slippers? I didn't curse my luck, how could I? I knew in my heart that I'd earned a trip to the karmic retribution woodshed; so I picked up their trash and put it back in the can, then trudged around the block in the rain in my sweats and slippers and slid into our kitchen where Julia asked where I'd been.
So there you go. I got what was coming to me. And while I learned a lesson, I'm also going to be strict about what finds it's way into my trash can in the future.
posted by drcaulder at
6:14 AM
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