Something stinky, Part 4: Warm crap in a bag

I don't get credit for that provocative tag line - Houstonia does.

If you don't read Houstonia, you should - it's awesome.  It's like a local Texas Monthly except it doesn't take itself quite as seriously and it sets the journalistic creativity bar much higher, particularly with respect to humor and the kind of Gestaltic insight that can only derive from a passionate sense of place. 

Screengrabbed from one of their Facebook entries of this morning; referenced story here. 

I'm borrowing the phrase for use as a tag line because last night saw me carrying that very substance (much more than Avogadro's quantity of it) for a longer distance than I would have preferred.  Except mine wasn't the much-maligned Frito pie - it really was warm crap in a bag. 

This kind of bag.  Leak proof, thank God. 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

See, I like to go jogging on either Sunday or Wednesday evening because that's when I am guaranteed to find at least a few trash cans set by the curb for pick-up the next day.  Therefore when my furry jogging companion makes her inevitable solid waste deposit, I can bag it and promptly slip it into someone else's can without having to carry the warm, mushy thing a full mile back to my own house. 

But here's the problem with Wednesday night jogs:  As I've noted previously, League City's trash contract is very inefficient and not many people bother to put their trash cans out, because we really don't need two trash collection days per week and Thursday is perceived as our "second" trash day and therefore that's the one most people ignore. 

I don't know how those poor buggers on the corner of Elm Pointe and Heather Pointe feel about having been designated the primary dog dumping ground in Centerpointe, but their side yard is scent central.  Many dogs, including mine, will intentionally hold in their goods for the chance to deposit them at this common canine marking ground.  If you guys see dog poo remaining on your property, it's from someone else's dog, not mine - I pick up hers every time. 

And after I pick it up, I carry it to the nearest trash can.  The while line shown on the screengrab above traces the distance from the point of deposit to the nearest available can last night. 

I had to jog eleven hundred feet past two dozen houses last night before I found a trash can set out for collection.  That's how few cans were set out in that area of the subdivision for this week's second collection event. 

As of this morning, the situation was slightly improved, at least in Section 9, where 37% of residents had set out their cans (they tend to be younger and more enthusiastically ritualized here, given our section's recent genesis).  But of course, as has historically been the case, most of those cans were holding just a single small kitchen bag of trash.  If we'd wanted to, we probably could have consolidated the entire section's 75 homes worth of trash into about five of the 96-gallon rolling bins. 

But take heart: there's now only four more years to go on League City's current waste management contract.


I'd like to dedicate this post to the fine folks in Republic Waste's corporate headquarters, the folks who have been following my commentary regarding the League City trash agreement, which some of us have interpreted to represent warm crap in a contract for reasons I will not recapitulate here but which can be found under the Trash label in this blog. 
:-)