The Normal Times

And if you gaze long into a trash pile, the trash pile also gazes into you.

Warning: this is a rant post that suggests no solutions, just classic bitching.

My working days are spent in a barely underground basement. It is so barely a basement that is has some of the biggest and beautifulest windows I’ve ever suffered the morning under. At the exact spot where I work, I’m as good as eye-level with the sidewalk. On that sidewalk in front of me is a decent tree (for the East Coast), and a free book box that sees a lot of activity.

I’ve learned a lot working my day job in this corner. I learned that one fucker on a rental bike steals a majority of the Amazon packages around here. He follows a regular schedule, a ratty version of hustle culture. I’ve also learned an unexpected stereotype that my wandering subconscious strung together after seeing so many members of one demographic niche pee all over everything. I even know what their piss walk posture looks like on approach, like dogs to the fire hydrant. And I’ve learned that no matter the city, to live in the urban mid-Atlantic is to opt for daily anxiety over parking or daily anxiety over moshing among the pervy rabble of public transit.

Out here, you’ve got no choice but to tolerate the whims of every shithead in a three-mile radius. Your life goes fine and unannoying for some ten day stretch until another cretin dumps her chewed and stained clutter out on the sidewalk in front of the space you happen to pay to sleep in. When this happens, the savvy thing to do, as considered by most, is to call a bot automated line to file your complaint. This gets you out a single something-hundred fine, but only sometimes depending on how cantankerous the city worker who answers the call is, and it doesn’t get rid of the mess pile. The bitch at 311 will lazily scold you for thinking you don’t have to go clean that shit up with your own stupid hands.

This kind of rule making is not made for heterogeneous societies. This works for communes, it works for cults. It works in silly places that barely exist in the global awareness, like Switzerland and archaeology museums. The logical conclusion of such a system, in an age and place that renders its assumptions irrelevant, is You deal with it. After all, you were the one dumb enough to associate yourself with it on record. You’re the one that can be leveraged because you gave them your name and details. The ghoul that dragged the mess there is absolved the second they take they drop their bag of shame. They’re as anonymous as a firehouse foundling. This is the homeowner’s version of the curse that tells you that answering the debt collector’s phone call is welcoming a half-year of personal burden, even if the caller is wrong. The absolute truth is that you did not cause this disorder, and it doesn’t matter at all. The skank who did this said, “Not my problem.” The city that will take more of your money over it with fines says, “Not my problem.” And if one were to try to balance the scales of fairness with the logical solution of staking out the corner from a high window with a loaded airsoft rifle aimed at the degenerate’s haunches, the city will quickly arrest you.

But you should be able to answer weird numbers on your own phone without concern that you’re getting tricked into another MoneyGram scam over toll booth fines you can’t possibly owe. You should be able to assault people, to beat them with a wire coat hanger, for dumping trash they made with their own dumb lifestyle that you will inevitably have to grasp in your own thinly-gloved hands after vomiting up your pride and living with your own full trash bags for yet another week for the sake of not having their shit out front. You should be able to traumatize these people, to mutilate them just enough that they can’t think of your block without shaking.

If you don’t make a fuss when you pay these fucking taxes, that should be the only signal necessary to get your city government’s workers off their unbelievably fleshy asses. Your complaint should carry weight since you pay the bill, and they should be paying for municipal employees that can identify the pattern of the problem while it’s merely budding. Obviously, that’s not what we have. We have checkmarks and bandaids on bandaids while any city worker we ever interact with has one scornful eye on us, and one bigger, less lazy eye on the pensions that we, the people who put money down, will pay for. Subsidizing the most useless years of the most useless workers in the world.

The urban cores of the East Coast each contain a lesson in how low trust societies are formed. Not by murder nor mere gang violence. Not aborted fetuses nor by not not aborted fetuses. It starts with taking people’s money and being indulgent with it. Rainbow crosswalks and corny commissioned murals are regarded with less hostility in places where people aren’t regularly greeted with the mess of strangers on their own doorstep. Cities out here punish the people who were fool enough to bother staking their money on their chosen shithole’s future. Punished by way of intentional systems that will never stop using the window-licker choices of tax burden citizens to siphon more cash from tax funding citizens.

And this is the nation’s capital. It’s a small picture of electoral failure, twice over. First, because this is a problem that requires heavy political hands, and those hands are softened and bound when hobos and property renters get a vote. Rootless people think rootlessly and those who have something more to lose by fleeing on a whim will always have the higher stake. There’s just no give-and-take for that risk anymore. And it’s not a money thing. The house I see this from costs ten piles more than I could have imagined when I was sweating through the Midwestern starter homes market. The second failure here is the idea that this kind of environment can be solved with any voting bullshit. Voting can only prevent, it cannot clean or clear or make the careless care. It’s the slobs’ world now, we just live in it.

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