Most every day, I walk for an hour. My beloved wife is of the view such a thing will enable me to fight off bears and nursing-home staff who wish to put me in kerosene baths well into my old age.
She may be right. So I go to the gym. Hump weights for an hour, then come home and march for an hour. I feel pretty good as a result. But that’s not what I wanna talk to you about.
I want to discuss male bonding and common enemies.
So here I am walking down a street near my home. Today is the day the garbage gets picked up in my town. Our local council, may it burn in all the medieval hells, has recently made garbage collection day an act of great stress for many ratepayers. Why? Well, obviously because council is full of cunts. What else did you think it might be?
Garbage-collection day is now stressful because council has, in its environmental wisdom, decided it will only pick up our red bins (all the rubbish) once a fortnight. It used to be weekly. Now it is fortnightly.
It used to work like this. We have three bins. Red (all the rubbish), green (grass and green things that decompose), and yellow (cardboard, paper, and glass, so recyclables). Red was emptied each week, and the other two alternated. Worked beaut.
But council felt it required “en-beautening”. To this end, it decided all food waste would now go into the green bin, and that green bin would be emptied weekly. The red emptying would now be a fortnightly thing, just like the yellow emptying.
To assist us all in this en-beautening, council gave us all a thick roll of small green rubbish bags that kinda felt like truck-stop toilet condoms to the touch, and a small plastic bin about the size of a crash-helmet box, which lives on my kitchen counter because I have nowhere else to put it, and that seems to be the most ergonomically viable spot for the fucker.
If I put it on the ground (and I have) I have to bend over a long way just to open it, and then there’s a chance I’ll miss depositing greasy chicken bones and chunks of meat gristle into the wee bin, and it will all end up on the floor and my wife will scream and assault me. I’m not having that, so council’s little bin lives on my counter to remind me of how environmentally sound I need to be all the time.
The whole exercise has been given the name “FOGO”. This likely stands for Fuck Off Gronk Ogre. Because that’s how it makes me feel.
Nonetheless, I abide. For this is not yet a war I need to engage in.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Walking on garbage-collection day.
Across the street from my route, a tattooed man of my age in a pair of stubbies was standing next to his bins. He saw me and yelled: “Did you do this?”
I stopped and paused the war report I was listening to on my phone.
“What?” I asked from across the street, thinking I had mis-heard him.
“Did you do this?” he repeated. He looked a touch angry.
I have never given any kind of fuck about angry people yelling at me, but I have always felt it best to get closer to them so they don’t have to yell so loudly. Yelling attracts witnesses. And witnesses are always counterproductive if things escalate.
So I crossed the street and walked towards him.
“What are you yelling about?” I asked him.
He looked me up and down, pointed to a sticker on his bin, then said in a very reasonable tone: “Did you do this?”
“What? The sticker? The bin? What are you talking about?”
On the instant, the man came to his senses.
“Mate, I am so sorry,” he said. “I thought you might have been from council and checking bins. I saw you with the phone and thought…fuck, I apologise.”
“No dramas, mate,” I grinned. “I have jumped to all sorts of crazy conclusions myself from time to time. Did they sticker your bin?”
“Fucken arseholes,” he spat. “I put a mango seed in a plastic bag, and that must have set them off.”
“You used the wrong plastic bag, huh?”
“They can get fucked,” he said shaking his head. “Now they won’t pick up my bin for another week.”
“And that is so much better for the environment,” I laughed. “All that shit can now rot in the hot sun for another seven days.”
“Let’s see the cunt put his head in it next week,” he laughed.
And now we were friends. Hell, we were comrades. We discussed how we were both a bit over red bins stinking for two weeks (because that’s where families put soiled nappies, and food scraps that won’t fit into the tiny plastic bags council has issued us), and how maybe it would be fruitful to take the contents of these overflowing bins and deposit them in council’s foyer.
Which was a proposal I floated to my wife when this bullshit first started.
“I was saying that to my wife the other week,” my new comrade declared.
“We are not alone,” I said to him. “There are surely others who think as we do.”
“Oh fuck yeah,” he smiled. “There’s tonnes of us.”
We parted on excellent terms. We were no longer masculine islands adrift in a merciless sea of council eco-fuckery. We were bonded now. Soon, others will join our cause. It is inevitable. It is inevitable because it is righteous.
Hoc est bellum, bitches! Acta non verba!
