LOOK, I KNOW you have problems of your own, but I have a giant plastic tub full of old cables and cords and power bricks and stuff. I don’t want to put ‘em in the landfill. If I give a buncha useless cords and cables to the Goodwill or whatever I don’t know what happens to them. They might just throw it all in the garbage. I read an article in the Washington Post newspaper that said take ‘em to Best Buy to be recycled, but like, what year is this, where is Best Buy?!?! How do I know what they’re really gonna do with ‘em? Is it a ruse to get me inside a brick and mortar store full of electronic hardware so I’ll start buying more shit with cords and cables? I don’t have good sales resistance! Exhibit A is all the cables and cords from all the crap I bought!
I feel bad about all the cords and cables and power bricks and broken computer mouses and all the other crapola that used to work or used to connect to stuff that worked, you know? I have watched the Hoarder-type teevee shows and I’m definitely self-diagnosing myself as a low-level Hoarder, OK? I know I have a Problem, but I feel like I’m losing some sorta battle if I don’t get this stuff disposed of the right way. I don’t know why I’m keeping score on this one aspect of throwing stuff out, though. I mean, I throw stuff in the garbage all the time, no problem. I know that my garbage is going to a giant landfill someplace near me, and someday I’ll be driving along one of the many superhighways near my home and I’ll see a ridgeline that I know is higher than it was the last time I looked at it. One of those hills you see in the distance and there’s always birds flying around it, and sometimes there’s things that look like lampposts silhouetted along the top, and they’re burning with blue flame. That’s methane, I think, from all my rotting garbage! Everything I ever threw in a garbage can as if I was a conscientious and tidy person, cleaning up my mess, except I just postponed the mess, and my Tax Dollars go toward moving my mess, a little bit at a time, to Mount Garbage!
Eventually the pile can’t get any higher and then the landfill rots and settles for a coupla more years or decades or something, and then it’s forgotten and somebody starts building houses or a park or something on top of it, and the next time I drive by I see a little suburban neighborhood of Garage-Townhouses and everybody inside is busy making their own garbage to get moved to the next frontier of garbage! This is the way!
I also delude myself and put stuff in the recycling bin. I know a lot of the cardboard and plastic bottles and glass bottles and many, many beer cans might not even get recycled, but it’s out of my hands, I did my part and separated my recycling, I’m attempting to be good to the planet!
Most of what I cut up or rinse out is probably just gonna end up in the same landfill with all the garbage I make, or, in the case of where I live, Baltimore, Maryland, United States, Earth, that recycling stuff might get burned up at a giant station near the football stadium and the Greyhound Bus terminal, a facility that generates electric power by burning trash, which seems crazy, right? Or is it good? Every once in a while I drive by that tower and when the wind is right, the stuff coming out of the big smokestack smells like one of those Bad Things that’s made out of a kabillion chemicals that all grow up to be Cancer, you know? But I put my recycling bin out every week! I’m trying to help!
So like, my cables, and my cords and stuff. Is there a difference between cords and cables? Anyway, if I keep all that crap in a plastic bin (supposedly recyclable and/or made out of something that was recycled) in my house, it’s not polluting anything, yet! I keep thinking if I hold onto this junk maybe somebody will figure out what to do with old cords, or at least the cables? I’m an optimist! Science!
I have also been thinking maybe I could use ‘em all as a festive Funeral Shroud. I will leave Final Instructions to have somebody just kinda wrap my corpse up in all my power bricks and cables and cords, all wound-up in a winding sheet of cables and cords! Corpse Cords!
The only problem with that plan, though, is I wanna get cremated, crackle-crackle-crackle! I feel like it’s weird to put my dead-ass body in a box and then in a park full of boxes of bodies, so I think it makes sense to take up less space and get it burned up, but I don’t wanna be responsible, even if I am Deceased, for torching a bunch of plastic-coated cables and cords somebody wrapped my Last Remains in, so now I’m second-guessing my whole Final Wishes, is it bad for the Environment to get incinerated? Unless maybe it could generate some electricity?
The MR. WRONG COLUMN is a general-interest column appearing weekly wherever it can appear. Write Wrong: wrongcolumn@gmail.com
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