Crude Reality

I apologise for the inelegance, but it is necessary to the story.

I am making many trips to the dump these days, in the context of clearing out things left at the new house plus clearing things from my old one.  I like going to the dump, generally.  Getting rid of things or cleaning things up gives me a sense of accomplishment. And these days, it's an errand I can do without compromising social distancing, so I can get out and about. It is good to greet people at the dump, minor pleasantries about weather or observations on what they have been working on. I like them, because they are people who have been working, getting something done, being responsible adults.

But sometimes one comes upon things done wrongly, of people cheating the system out of laziness or avoiding fees. When I talk to the dump guys I find that these things happen a lot, of people frustrated that they have come after hours and just throwing their trash over the fence, of throwing household trash in the metal recapture bin because they couldn't be bothered to make a second stop thirty yards away.  The line is Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" was a set-up for humor, but saying Well, we had never heard of a dump being closed on Thanksgiving before is equivalent to saying "We are new to this business of being responsible adults." Of course the dump is going to be closed on Thanksgiving.

Because it is often a garbagey, smelly mess left in an inappropriate place it is easy to recall a line a psychologist told me years ago: The goal of therapy is for everyone to be able to wipe his own ass. I would substitute in simply "adulthood" for the therapy part, but the concept still holds.  He was a friend and admirer of Fritz Perls , so Fritz may be the originator of the idea. I am not an admirer of Perls myself, but it does sound like him.