The Rubbish Problem

You know what my biggest problem has always been? It's difficult to admit it, and it's painfully funny to think about it.

When I was young, my parents made me take out the trash every evening. I'd collect all the trash bags from around the house, consolidate them, and pack them into as tight a space as possible without bursting any bags. If a bag wasn't particularly full, I'd empty its contents into another bag and keep the original in its bin.

One evening, I took out the trash as usual. The air was redolent with the scent of cured tobacco from the Rothmans factory nearby, or at least something that smelt suspiciously like it. And then I realised two things.

The first thing was that I could walk north, and by morning, be in another country.

The second thing was that I actually liked taking out the trash. I'd grown into a person who liked exposing useless things, bagging them, and throwing them away. I never saw a piece of junk that didn't seem to say to me, "Bag me up and throw me away."

Well, you now know the kinds of thoughts that go through my head when people talk rubbish. Sometimes, they publish rubbish. Or summon large numbers of people and lie to them. Whoever 'they' are, they are masters of junk.

And I have this great urge to say it is junk, to expose it, bag it, and throw it away. It never fails to get me into trouble. And that's the problem.

Tidying

The problem with living with an archivist is that everything is kept and nothing is thrown away. Anything with text on it is piled in archaeological layers which one is afraid to disturb or otherwise disrupt. And one fears that the removal of a single item will bring about catastrophe.

Today we removed 20 kg of what we thought was likely to be disposable fissile material: disposable in the sense that it could be bagged and thrown away, fissile in the sense that it was likely to spread in some sort of proliferative manner by falling apart spontaneously, material in the sense that it was only too tangible.

After that, brother and I looked at each other with a strong sense of 'mission accomplished'. Yes, another satisfying male-bonding sibling moment. Heh.