Saturday 20 September 2014

THIS BIN IS RUBBISH


Look at this bin. Don't try to understand it, don't even think of putting any garbage in it, because it's locked up tighter than a Scotsman's wallet. If you laughed at that you're a racist.

I found out the hard way about this bin, after trying to put my empty coffee cup into it. It was having none of that, so I ended up carrying the cup for a few hundred more metres, eventually depositing it in somebody's residential bin. And in the fullness of time, I realised that despite its public location, just outside the Graceville train station, it was wrong of me to assume that the bin (pictured) was an amenity for my convenience.

It could well be a piece of installation art for all I know, a comment on the paradoxes encountered in everyday life. Like these open-toed galoshes – an object with many of the attributes of a useful thing, rendered impractical in the detail. Like Brisbane's public transport system in general.


Maybe the bin is ceremonial, and once a day one of the train station employees puts on a special hat, proceeds to the sacred bin fortress with a big clanking set of keys on his hip, opens the lock with much pomp and circumstance, and drops into the bin one single, perfect, hallowed piece of rubbish. And all of the people cheer, and then the integrity of the bin's borders is restored.

We will choose the rubbish that comes into this bin and the manner by which it comes, that kind of thing.

I don't really know why the memory of the bin has stayed with me. My friend Robo says "memory is a recidivist criminal", and if so, this one is guilty of loitering. For most people it probably wouldn't warrant a mention, a piece of minutia in their day, flotsam and jetsam, indeed, garbage. Perhaps it's because at the time I was a bit hungover, but the buoyant kind of hungover, where you still feel a bit drunk, and you are prepared to accept the insanities of reality with little more than a hazy shrug. Barista says "$5 dollars" upon handing you a coffee "Fuuu..." Bus driver says "Don't touch off your GoCard here, go to the train station for some reason" "...uuuuuuccc..." even the constant reminder of that guy who owes you that large sum of money, you're willing to laugh it off, with a smile. He can go "...ccckkk" himself.

Maybe it's not even about the money any more, about respect, the tricky end of Maslow's hierarchy. It's about the right, nae the duty, to speak out about this kind of bullshit. Why the fuck are you teasing me with this theoretical bin? Locking it up like an unaccompanied minor? Where's my money?

Why would you spend all that money on the iPhone 6? You never answer your phone anyway, you may as well have spent $1000 on a paperweight...

Because all it takes for evil to triumph is someone chaining up a wheelie bin while good people stand by and say nothing.


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