- Cape Rolling Out Bloomfield Road Art Trail (8/21/19)1
- Donors Pledge Almost Two Grand To Replace SEMO's Possibly Sentient ‘Gum Tree' (8/16/18)
- SEMO and The Will To (Become A Consultant) – Part 2 (6/14/18)
- SEMO and The Will To Do (You Really Want To See That Legal Notice?) – Part 1 (6/4/18)
- Judge, Jury... Trashman (6/1/18)
- Diary of Cape Girardeau Road Deconstruction (5/11/18)
- Trying To Save A Tree From City “Improvements” (4/30/18)2
Is It Wrong To Love My Trashcan?
I think I may love my trashcan.
At least I love one of my trashcans and not in the perverse way that you might find on a kinky website like TrashcanLust.com or DumpsterLuvin.net. No, I love it in a purely platonic, I-love-you-man, guy-kind-of-way.
The trashcan is the one that I brought to my marriage. Ol' Blackie is what I call him, mainly because he's old and he's black.
My wife brought two trashcans to our marriage. I tolerate them since they are
trashcans-in-law. One is called Bluey. He's blue. The other is named Wheel. He used to be named Wheels until an overly-aggressive refuse collection agent bounced him a little too hard on the sidewalk causing one of his two plastic tires to shatter. He's also missing a handle.
When he's full, you have to balance him just right to get him to roll on his lone wheel. It's kind of sad. Sort of like watching a 3-legged dog run after a stick tossed on an ice-covered pond.
The trashcans my wife and I bought a few years ago we call The Quads since there are four of them. I do not love The Quads. I don't even particularly like them. Frankly, The Quads have been great big disappointments. They are the cheapest waste receptacles I've ever owned.
I won't say who made those four, but the name sounds a little like Blubber Weighed. I thought when I bought The Quads that they were a good deal. They were a name brand as far as plastic manufacturers go, made by the same company that made Bluey and they were reasonable-priced at about ten dollars each.
But holes quickly appeared in The Quad's soft, malleable plastic and within months of being acquired a couple of the cans had tears on their sides. One of the lids developed a bad split making it useless. I pitched it. The trashcans are still basically usable, but will they last 20 years like my trashcan or even my trashcans-in-law? Not in a heartbeat.
Currently, I use The Quads along with Ol' Blackie for primarily collecting and hauling yard waste to the Cape recycling center.
While Ol' Blackie has a couple of small holes in his bottom, he has no splits, his handles are rock-solid and his lid still fits great. Basically he is as sound as the day I bought him at Central Hardware almost 20 years ago. Considering that he is just hard plastic and sits outside in the elements year-round, he is in remarkable shape.
Ol' Blackie has been a stalwart companion. He's carried tons of plaster and lathe and other assorted construction debris that comes with renovating several houses over the years. At times I've filled him with so much yard waste that I've had trouble just dragging him over to my truck for a trip to the recycling center. That might explain the holes on his bottom.
In a word, Ol' Blackie is reliable. And I'm sure he'll be there when the day comes that I need to put one or more of The Quads out of their misery and dispose of their rubbery remains by the curb.
After all, he is a trashcan's trashcan.
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