Sour Notes

It was cold and breezy at the RDF. An Arctic air mass had moved in over night and was sitting directly overhead. The spinning high pressure system created a swirling maelstrom of paper, plastic bags and leaves in a virtual trash storm. Lord knows when the cold wind blows it'll turn your head around.

The sun was just breaking the horizon to the east as I drove the access road to the shack that I presumptuously refer to as my office. The James Taylor tune was rattling around in my head like a loose lugnut in a hubcap. I've seen lonely days when I could not find a friend.

I was thinking about the futility of working here at the dump. Most jobs have a point where you can say, "I'm done." The product is shipped. The service is delivered. The wall is painted. The patient is dead. The fire is out. The miscreant is unconscious in a holding cell. The campaign is over.

But, working at the dump is much like being a US senator. You can work thirty years and never get anything done. Rust never sleeps. The flow of junk is ceaseless. You can never measure success because there is only the eternal pipeline of offal

Sure, We go home at the end of the day, and tell our inappreciative desperate housewives how hard we worked, and how many tons of garbage we processed. But we never feel the satisfaction of "done." It's like shoveling sand against the tide. Split beams and sewing machines in pieces on the ground.

I guess I was subconsciously thinking about the recent election. The results were disappointing. Another 4 years of slipping backward into the pit of evil conservatism. 4 more years of yapping about the sanctity of marriage by politicians who cheat on their opposite sex spouses, more wasting US treasure in a futile effort to democratize a people who will never accept the concepts of tolerance and equality, more tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy, more empty rhetoric about the importance of life - specifically between conception and birth, more homeless and hopeless wandering the streets. I heard a rumor that Bush will nominate Ashcroft to the Supreme Court and it turned my bowels to acid. Fire and rain - I have a feeling that we haven't seen anything yet.