Trash Talk

Okay ... and now for something completely different... I need to get this off my chest.

 

I love Willowick. I do.  Well, okay, I love it NOW.

When I was young and growing up here, I thought it was Snoozerville and couldn’t wait to leave home and move someplace fun and exciting like, I don’t know, Chicago or Las Vegas.  So, when I finally moved out of my Mom and Dad's house (yep, same house I'm back in today!) I moved to Willoughby (which is one exit down on the freeway).  Willoughby's okay, but basically it's a slightly more picturesque Snoozerville with bigger trees, smaller houses and way more religious statues sitting in the front yards.

But Willowick is a great town to come back to (which is what I really think its motto should be), and, with the exception of a few gripes (all of which I’m sure will eventually see the light of day here on my blog), I’m happy being here.  But there is one issue that’s been bugging me since 2011, and now that I have a captive (such as you are) audience, here you go:

Why is garbage day in this town such a hassle? 

When I was a kid, this wasn’t really all that hard.  Every week Dad would yell at me until I went out to the garage and banged our two stinky, maggoty aluminum trash cans (circa 1947) down the driveway, parked ‘em on the tree lawn, and that was the end of it.  The cans were great -- they made all kinds of noise, which masked my excessive swearing.  I used to love it at night when there’d be a wind storm and I’d hear the lids clattering up and down Ronald Drive, keeping everybody awake.  It was even more fun when somebody didn’t push down on a lid tightly enough and some enterprising raccoon would spew trash all over the sidewalks for the school kids to step over crossing the street to Royalview Elementary.

Okay … so maybe those rusted, sharp-edged, dented giant tin cans were bio-hazardous tetanus death traps that were smelly and disruptive.  The blue, 95-gallon plastic trash bins Willowick now requires each of us to use are easily wheeled up and down the driveway and are, admittedly, pretty efficient (except when the lids blow open at night, but let’s face it – here in northeast Ohio, we’d have to nail shut and superglue any container we'd want permanently closed.  Our own Lake Erie wind tunnel never stops making our lives more interesting.)  Of course, I still want to know how these things are going to function when winter comes (‘cuz we didn’t have winter this year – for some reason it totally skipped us, praise Jesus).  But in a REAL winter, you know how it is … the snow piles up three or four feet on the tree lawns, and isn't that where the garbage tote is supposed to sit?  What are we supposed to do then, park it in the street? Surely the City of Willowick doesn’t think I’m going to pull a Grinch and balance that thing atop the drifts like a sleigh full of toys atop Mt. Crumpet? I know, I know, it’s only the end of May … but hey, like I always say, it’s never too early to dread our miserable, God-forsaken winters. 

But besides how this is going to work in winter, I have one other major concern that comes every month, and that centers around (da-da-DAAAA!) “bulk pickup day.” 

Now, in my happier and much younger years, there was no limit to the amount of trash we could drag out to our tree lawns any given week. You could pile three garbage cans, 60 feet of soiled carpeting, an old bathtub and a dead body out there and the garbage men would still pick it all up, no questions asked.  But now that society is so much more advanced and efficient … well, we're not allowed to do that anymore.  Most weeks we can only throw out what will fit inside the container, and I’ve noticed many of my neighbors have a different concept of “fit” than I do.  You know how when you go to the airport and you have a carry-on, and there’s this tiny little metal container in front of the x-ray belt your bag is supposed to fit into (or you can’t bring it on the plane?)  And ... you know how we all ignore it?  Well, our little dumpsters are kinda the same.  I’m always impressed when a neighbor actually manages to close the lid, because on Thursday night (after 6 p.m. - NO EARLIER, OR YOU'LL DIE AND GO TO HELL ) I'll look up and down Ronald Drive and see a row of dumpsters that blatantly defy gravity and other laws of physics, their hefty bags bulging out of their tops the way teen aged girls do at the mall. The most resourceful Willowickians (Willowicksters?  Willowickites?  What the hell are we called, anyone know?) will always make their dumpsters look like a roasting pig with an apple in its mouth. 

But you see, if it doesn’t somehow go into the bin, it doesn’t get picked up.  That’s the golden garbage rule. You can’t put out anything other than your tote … EXCEPT ON BULK PICKUP DAY.  

Yes... on that magical day you can put out almost anything and somebody will pick it up and take it away.  Once a month we are allowed to return to the glory of yesteryear and put out that large, scary stuff we've been storing in the garage all month (unless it's on the exception list - check the brochure). The only problem is nobody can figure what day it is. Oh, there's a schedule. Every street has its own day - ours is Friday.  So hey, on Friday during the first full week of the month (unless there's a holiday in that week, then it's a day later) we're allowed to put out the bulk stuff.  But understand its the first FULL week of the month, meaning that if a nasty 30th or 31st from the previous month creeps in on a Sunday, it's not the first FULL week and you have to wait until the next week, and... you see? Already it's too complicated, and that shit just messes us all up.  The last time we had bulk pick up day, I had to go to the City of Willowick website (www.cityofwillowick.com) to download the schedule before hauling a queen-sized mattress out to the curb. I was still scared I had the wrong day because NOBODY else had any free-wheeling junk sitting out.  Well, once I put my cat-scratched mattress out there, guess what?  Doors started opening and little "presents" started popping up on everybody else's lawns.  I guess all we needed was one brave soul to start the bulk trash ball rolling around here because seriously, nobody can handle the complexity of all this.  

I mean, look at this flyer.  More than a year ago these showed up in our mail, just before the city gave us our dumpsters.  I've put together cheap furniture that came from Walmart in a flat box with instructions easier to understand than this thing:

But, in the end, I know I shouldn't complain.  My sister Barbara can't get over how easy we have it.  At least we don't have the trash police picking through our refuse to make sure we didn't do anything "un-green," like throw away organic waste or accidentally dispose of some useless piece of recyclable crap.  Can you guess what city she lives in?  Hint: think California and hippies.  

So ... I guess we've got it pretty good.  That frightens me.  And you can bet I'll be back to discuss this further after our next lake-effect snow event, when I know I'll be pushing that thing up Mt. Everest.