Garbage Can Wars
Seems the neighbors across the alley have developed a very special fondness for my steely hard, black plastic dreck drum. Yesterday was trash day and while the misses was leaving for work she discovered our can to be overflowing with debris that clearly wasn’t the waste product of our own weekly detritus. Serious foul play was suspected, but the trash men came before I had a chance to inspect our proprietary slop bucket. Who fucks with another man’s garbage can? Haven’t you seen that one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm? My can is not for your scrap. Period.
I don’t know what’s going on in this lawless house behind us. I never see the same people twice coming in or going out. But over the last month their garbage pile has been monumental in scope and epic in sprawl. Kitchen sinks, mattresses, cabinetry, iron work and a thousand boxes that bore some kind of Toys R’ Us hieroglyphics which clearly identified these people as hardcore consumers. The perfect capitalistic system in one household. Buy as much dumb shit as you can just so you can throw it in the garbage next week. Repeat cycle until you’re swimming in the shark tank with loan officers and happy debt collectors.
Which is all fine. Live and let (the other dumb people) live, I say. Even if it means I have to perform three extra maneuvers to get my car out of the garage and set on its course down the alley. But damn, once your shit starts encroaching in on my can…well, you best be ready to throw down back alley style my friend.
Woops. Let’s realign these tangential lines tho, and get back to the story…So today being the day after garbage pick up day, a day when normally the can should be an empty waiting receptacle for the coming weeks waste, we find as we pull the car out of the garage that our can is already erupting with a huge spilling pile of scrap. And some scary freaking dude who looks exactly like Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu, is in the process of bringing out more rubble to throw on the already galactic heap he’s got going on his side of the alley!
Drastic measures. A roll-a-decks worth of booby-trap ideas begin to collate in my brain. I curse myself for not owning a megaphone. WTF? I need to buy a megaphone today. Returning to the home this morning, I immediately wheel my can over to their drive-way, which is no small task because this Nosferatu wannabe fuck-stick has filled it with about 500 square feet of the ugliest ripped up linoleum ever designed. It takes me several minutes to scatter the large bits all over their driveway. Then I affix a polite sign to the can, in the hopes that this will end this silliness before things escalate and get seriously weird.