Sometimes the stars align and a great truth is revealed.
Or, sometimes a friend sends you an internet link that just so happens to jibe with a thought you were about to post.
This morning it was the latter.
And the subject is "waste".
Not "wasting", although they do that here in spades. They go through more water than the Lost City of Atlantis, and they're in a desert.
No, we're talkin' trash. Garbage. And other...waste.
My original thought revolved around trash. They seem to have a thing for it here. The highway into town is literally littered with trash. The now dead river through town? Full of trash. Vacant lots? Trash dumps. With the fog, you could dump a dead body on your neighbor's lawn and, unless someone tripped over it, it could go undiscovered for days. But it's not just slovenly trailer park living.
It's a state of mind.
Several months ago my favorite morning news show morphed into "Good Morning Kern County", losing most of it's hickish appeal. Gone was the snorting bull logo and the old coot doing traffic. Gone too ,the loudmouth sports guy. It became generically bland, a high school version of a morning show. Nothing Bako about it.
Except for the opening....
Every morning show out of New York opens with misty shots of daybreak over Manhattan. In LA it was the sun rising over the skyline, light dawning on the Hollywood sign, maybe the moon setting in the Pacific beyond the Santa Monica pier.
Here?
It's a trash truck.
As the "morning music" tinkles in the background, you see a shot of the sun rising and then it dissolves to one of Bako's ubiquitous brown trash trucks. Its arm extends, it grabs a bin, hoists it high, shakes out it's contents, and then we dissolve to the loopy, grinning anchors at the news desk. The end. They've put your day in the dumper and you haven't even had coffee yet. It always makes me laugh. Your day has nowhere to go but up at that point.
And then this morning a friend of mine emailed me an article about the fact that for years, decades even, all of the er... "solids" from LA's waste treatment plants has been trucked here to Bako.
And deposited.
"I'm standing in front of a series of small poo-soaked piles of used condoms, toilet paper, rags and tampon applicators accumulating in the massive headworks building of the Hyperion Treatment Plant, where the majority of Los Angeles' sewage is treated..."
"But whether or not L.A.'s sludge represents a hazard to Kern County residents is, in a way, irrelevant. What's unfair to the people of Kern County is having to deal with stupendous volumes of someone else's exported poo."
(http://www.realitysandwich.com/how_save_world_pooping_bucket)
That explains it! These poor, downtrodden people have been pooped on! By society! For years! No wonder they have such a lackadaisical attitude for garbage. Why they, reluctantly I'm sure, embrace it.
Hmmm... there must be something I can do...
