Wednesday, November 15, 2006


TRASHY
NYC is lucky to have such an efficient infrastructure. In particular people to pick after others. I’ve never really been a witness to littering on the scale I see here, people tossing cups, gum wrappers, newspapers, whatever they don’t feel like dealing with right onto the ground. It must be incredibly liberating to think of the world as your trash can. It drives me crazy, I’m the kind of person that gets upset if a tiny piece of plastic wrapper falls out of my hand and blows away, all I can think of is it taking decades of time to decompose. Surprisingly enough this place is clean, cleaner than most cities I’ve been too. The upside is that it creates jobs, so the city can thank the slobs for creating opportunity.

On another note, one would think a city that doesn’t use private garbage cans (instead piling up trash in large plastic bags on the sidewalk as in the photo above), would have garbage spilling out everywhere. Of course, that happens, but not that much. Instead the trash piles are an amazing repository for almost anything you could possibly need, like the dumpsters in college towns when school is out of the summer and students leave their apartments for good, dumping just about everything they owned. Why shop? Mops, chairs, books,cabinets, lamps: some of it is truly crap but like most of our disposable society much of what is disposed of is perfectly fine. You could furnish and entire home with stuff from the street.