Fun with Trash

This winter's huge snow storms left big white snow banks crowding NYC streets' shoulders, but also black trash mountains.  And recycling: bundles of cardboard and large, clear bags of plastic and glass, plus miscellaneous bulky items.  Sanitation workers occupied with removal of the great white visitor that threatened us all, the city's daily detritus (plus the usual complement of TVs, clothes, furniture...) would stack up for days--two weeks went by before curbside pick-up resumed after the first big blizzard hit on December 26.

 (kids playing at the base of a massive snow sidewalkgnome built on the northwest corner of Canal and East Broadway, Jan 29, 2011. Note orange cone top hat, courtesy of NYCDOT)

After snow heaps receded and trash remained, I thought about rounding up some friends to join me at creating a multi-cited sculptural commentary on the situation: I envisioned  3-black-bag-tall 'trash men' complete with bottle cap eyes and aluminum can pull-tab noses springing up in strategic locations (the steps of City Hall?  The Sanitation Dept. headquarters' curb?).  Instead, I wrote these haikus, while the streets and sidewalks still bore witness to that storm's social crisis:

I love a Saturday
When new years eve is Friday
Streets recovering

White wet receding
Replaced by mountains of trash
Busy bulldozers

Hurried, heroic
Racing high temperatures
But not quick enough

Third term sullying
Blizzard buries Mayor Bloomberg
As if by design

Black trash bags
Splintered pallets broken crates
Chinatown wreckage

January and early February brought more storms and more heaps of trash, but the visuals weren't ever quite as striking as that first storm.  In the end, it's been a rather trashing winter--New Yorkers have been with fairly frequent reminders of their voracious consumption.  Aggregated in biggening curb walls, our trash froze and thawed, grew white afros and then shed them, got stray, cast-off bits tossed onto them, and waited around for their ticket onto a truck and eventually up or downriver on a barge.  They embarrassed us with their persistence, and annoyed us when we were in a hurry and had to single file past them on our sidewalks.  Luckily, it was too cold for rats and roaches.  I know I wasn't alone in thinking it could be good for us to live semi-regularly with these betrayals of our appetites for take-out and single-serving yogurt.  Wonder whether we could come up with the curbside pick-up equivalent of this special Swedish can, brought to us by Volkswagon, via Andrew Revkin's NYT Dot Earth blog: