In the dumps

It’s been raining every night after school this week or we’ve been out and about and it’s been too dark to do any Litter Ninja-ing of any sort, save for the odd can or Red Rooster bag I pick up as I’m passing by.

That said, there was one bit of litter that I did see – and smell – and passed by several times, stewing inside.

The street we live on backs onto the local high school and there’s tiny little grassy strip that cuts it in half to stop people from speeding and to confuse furniture and pizza delivery men. Two very unenthusiastic bottle brush trees live there, suffering from the regular clouds of cigarette smoke or from being leaned against during marathon snogging sessions from teenagers.













That’s just during the week. On the weekends, the trees are subject to having beer bottles smashed against their apathetic stabilising poles and a bit of illiterate scratching on their trunks and my tongs are used to gingerly pick up the scarier pieces of glass so that the kids can continue their Monday-to-Friday smoke-and-grope sessions in relative safety.

This time, the Loser Boozers had left an offering of a different kind; one that was much harder to pick up despite its size.

In fact it was so grand in stature that locals had begun to talk about it amongst themselves. Amy hurried young Patrick along, saying, “I don’t want him to get too close a look at it, but how can you not? Who on earth is capable of making such a thing?”

The thing was a human turd. Or big, brown, moist pyramid of excrement, oh-so-discreetly ‘covered’ with two men’s handkerchiefs, presumably used as wipes beforehand. This thing was so large it even threatened to overtake the community’s collective disgust and replace it with concern for the health of the person who laid such an awful egg. Had they survived? Were they able to walk again? Had the A&E Department been notified?

It was located in my designated Litter Ninja zone.

For three days I stewed, knowing that I could not ignore it and hope that it would go away. It was so immense that a village on its southern slopes had all but perished during a mud slide and Bert Newton was hosting a telethon on the northern side.
















Our suburb is a peculiar mix of bogans, barristers and everything in between and frequently comes alive to the sound of renovations. Skip bins in Melbourne are everywhere and it appears to be an unspoken inevitability that the darkness brings out people from neighbouring weatherboard cottages, holding enormous IKEA boxes, busted microwaves, three-legged outdoor chairs and the traditional stained mattress.

Maybe I should contact some waste management expert to help me – their skips were already starting to mate and increase in number around my ‘hood like the urban equivalent of rabbits.....
......A couple of days later there other things on my mind besides the Chocolate Cheops four houses up. My editor hated the last article I submitted and actually said the words ‘big stick’ and ‘waste of my time’. My cholesterol level is now 7.4 (up from 6.5 the same time last year) and despite my regular runs I can no longer fit comfortably into the size 12 dress I was planning on wearing to a posh event later in the week and my little brother ended up in hospital.

Grabbing five shopping bags I strode up the street, whipping out some junk mail from Mr Divvy Van’s letterbox as I went. The papers sorta kinda covered the man mountain and the bags were used like big doggy doo gloves. Several layers later, the fifth bag was tied up and thrown into a nearby skip, with a nervous hope that the old sheet of corrugated iron that it landed on wasn’t going to pierce it....

After several OCD hand washes, I decided to phone Monash Uni’s neurological research unit as my sister-in-law had suggested. They were looking for people who suffered from regular migraines and depression to see if they could find a chemical as well as psychological link.

Would I be prepared to undertake a phone survey first, to determine if I’m a suitable candidate? Absolutely. Migraine symptoms, duration and frequency = definitely suitable.
Depression? Let me get back to you. Can I call you back, say later this afternoon after I’ve properly analysed the results and had a chat to my supervisor? Of course, knock yourself out. What do I care – I just hammer threw a two kilogram bag of poo into a skip!

Ring ring, ring ring, 3pm.
“Hi Kath, it’s Rebecca. We’ve had a look at your results and..... I’m really sorry, but you’re not suitable to participate our study.”
“How come?”
“Well.....,” she trailed off... “.....you’re too happy.”

And you know what? She’s right.

Litter Ninja















I have become something that all reasonable sane and aspiring-to-be-cool teenagers everywhere dread and despise - no, not a social studies teacher, a public litter collecter. Or is it picker-upperer? Socially-aware Scavenger? Trash Tracker?

.....Loser? Well, I prefer the term 'Litter Ninja'. Whatever the title, my mother is proud that her genes actually have started to make themselves known in my own mix of cells and synapses as she's been a regular power-walking litter-picking mini-skip at the picnic reserve near her house for many years.

Mum's habit finally awoke in me after too long trying to resolutely ignore the rubbish everywhere I went, saying 'I didn't do it, so I'm not taking care of it,' and pretending that the pathway leading into the kiddie's playground was lined with barkchips instead of cigarette butts and the twinkles in the hedges were fairy lights and not the ring-top pulls from beer cans.

Every single home we've owned - even after moving cities four different times - have always found us within walking distance of a McDonalds. Under-utilised Physics undergrads could be invited to determine the factors that influence the distance from a take-away establishment and the time taken to eat the food whilst walking drunkenly home and dumping the bag, wrappers and soft drink bucket-with-lid directly in front of our gate.

In Adelaide we only had the local Maccas to deal with but being sandwiched here in Melbourne with Red Rooster and Pizza Hut on Mt Alexander Road and Subway, KFC and the Golden Arches on Racecourse Road, our little street resembles the inner-city equivalent of a waving field of Edelweiss if cruelly replaced by half-squished sauce packets, straws and paper napkins. Throw in at least two kidnapped trolleys from Safeway, abandoned sofa cushions wet by rain and beer cans dumped by late night punters walking back to the drying out centre and you'll get some idea of the lovely urban ambience we've been enjoying in our little corner of the world.

It was high time to take a stand, be a member of my community and take some pride in my surroundings. Unlike my mother, my de-littering occurs under the cover of darkness (oh OK close to tea time because it's dark by 6pm) or on the weekends when the school yard is deserted.















Sometimes Sapphire - who at ten is beyond her teens in terms of insight but is still mostly willing to hang around with her mum - will accompany me, but usually it's just Milly the dog; in mad passionate love with anyone holding her lead and saying 'Wanna go for a walk?'

Cold Sunday afternoons/evenings just before tea sees Sapph zooming around the bitumen triangle on her scooter or trying her hardest to throw an adult-sized basketball through the adult-sized basket at our local high school. Milly gleefully trots around sniffing the bushes, finding ancient sandwiches wedged into the gaps of the plank seats or rolling in the sticky patches left from crushed Red Bull cans lingering only two metres away from empty rubbish bins.

Another father arrives with his young sons and he throws a basketball to them and involves Sapphire in their game. The 'dong-dong-dong' sound of duelling basketballs reassures me that she's happy and I can continue my embarassing quest for cleanliness.

I'm a pitiable sight - bent over like an old crone with a plastic shopping bag in one hand and an old pair of BBQ tongs in the other with my snot green eyes focussed solely on the ground, quadrangle, indigenous garden and canteen queue-space for anything like chewie wrappers, fruit boxes, clear plastic straw covers, egg sandwiches, styrofoam coffee cups, coke bottles, chip bags and meusli bars half-eaten and rejected for Mars Bars.....

....and sneakily-squashed cigarette butts, broken lighters, socks, ripped-up assignments, Chinese take-away containers, alfoil balls, clingwrap strands, shoelaces, condom wrappers* and mandarin peels.

An hour later, my work is done. During that time, a group of bored teens walk past, with one who looks like a chubby Zac Efron calling out, "Hey you missed a can over there," as the others snigger; Milly takes offence at the friendly overtures made by a Spaniel puppy ("Sorry about that, she loves people but considers her fellow species as slobbering evil incarnate"); get hit in the back of the scone by one of Sapphire's stray basketball shots and, for some reason, a bloke in a commodore yells out, "GET A JOB" as he's idling at the Mt Alexander Road traffic lights.

As I clip Milly's lead back on and signal to Sapph that it's time to leave, the father smiles and says, "It's a nice thing you're doing."

My back cracks as I stand up and accept the compliment gratefully. "Thanks. Well, it's our neighbourhood and it's going to be the high school that our kids will end up at isn't it?"

"Oh no," he shoots back instantly, pursing his lips in distaste. "No way." He turns his back towards his children and their game again, instantly dismissing me. I guess they'll have paid ground staff to do this kind of dirty work at the college he'll be sending his kids to.



















* I suspect that even in these groovy times, most teens use condoms to inflate like obscene party balloons at school than the slightly-more-fun and adult purpose they were originally intended for.

Wheelie bin Dealings

There are many times in your life when you realise that a) you're no longer young and b) you no longer care, but there are also other times when you realise that the things that genuinely get you excited these days are a) are mundane, and b) embarrassingly tragic.

It is time to share one of them with you: Wednesday Wheelie Bin Night. This weekly evening experience is as eagerly anticipated as sitting down to watch Spicks and Specks on the telly with a lapful of Lindt balls or when we buy a fresh clutch of Farmers Union Iced Coffee Cartons from Safeway. Yep, it's that good.




















And why is WWBN so important? Well, moving house means a lot of boxes. Boxes mean cardboard, which in turn equates to recycling. All good so far, except that the wheelie bins we've been allocated by the Moonee Valley Council are about a third the size of the ones we owned in Adelaide. Ooompah Loompahs could perhaps be satisfied with their dimensions but only if flotsam and jetsam such as dog food cans, deadly wrinkled glad wrap, junk mail and coffee grounds form part of their staple diets.

We've squashed down most of the boxes and taken them to the $20-per-car tip at Heidelberg along with dozens of empty paint tins (thoughtfully left behind by the previous owners so that we'd 'know what colours we used on and inside the house'), floor rugs, suitcases and white foam packaging that I'm convinced mates and breeds even bigger and more plentiful versions of itself.




















With the delivery of the treadmill, the Super-Size-Me BBQ, Love Chunks' funky new fandangled bike and a few other annoyingly over-packaged new house incidentals, the cardboard still lingers like an unwanted cousin houseguest three days after nanna's funeral. The trouble is, it's been over three weeks for some of our stuff and the last thing we want to do on our Saturdays is cut and flatten boxes, cram them into the back of the wagon and drive to a faraway dump and then pay cash for the experience. Trust me: having our car idling behind a bloke in a ute trying to haggle with the dump manager about only having to pay $18 to dump one mattress instead of the two he had - "But they're for SINGLE beds mate, come on!" - on a 39C day inhaling the aroma of mulch, manure and prawn heads was most un-fun.

Next door to us on one side is a three-storey block of twelve units. I've decided to use the term 'units' because they're from the 1960s-era and look like 'flats' to me but apparently this is NOT the word to use and betrays my country-bumpkin origins, era and uncoolness. Fine, but I refuse to call them 'apartments' when they're older than I am and are all squished in together.

The body corporate of these units has given them four massive recycling bins that are put out fortnightly and six bloody huge red normal-garbage bins that are out every week. Sapphire's bedroom could fit inside one of them and still have space for my treadmill and it was when I noted this fact that my excitement started to sprout. WWBN was going to be the answer to my prayers!















Whatever rubbish overload we have is now surreptitiously squeezed into any vacant space left in their bins. Naturally this complex and rather ingenious maneouvre is done under the cover of darkness so as not to create any ugly scenes or accusations. Instead, I wait until the final 'bonk bonk' sound of all of their bins have been dragged to the kerb and the last 'thwack' of the lids indicate that each and every tenant has shoved their weekly garbage inside.

Then, tiptoeing outside - a pretty delicate feat when wearing oversized thongs or sweaty Crocs - I oh-so-quietly ease open the gate, sneak a furtive glance to the left, the right and the left again - taking particular care to ensure that no-one is enjoying an evening drink, smoke or domestic on their overhanging balconies - and then make my ninja-like moves towards the red and yellow-topped answers to my cardboard conundrum. If it's not too hot I sometimes add a few commando rolls to add to the tension and to draw out the excitement factor.

At this rate, we'll have all of our cardboard packaging disposed of by, oh I don't know, Melbourne Cup Day. I know; it's pretty heady stuff..