Garbage Trucks Quotes

Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. So when someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Believe me. You’ll be happier.

How do I look?” She was wearing a pair of tiny jean shorts and a bright pink T-shirt. Her blond hair was matted on one side and there were dirt smudges all over her arms, legs, and face. Gabriel hesitated. “Like a Barbie doll that got run over by a garbage truck.” “Wow. Really, Gabriel?

I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. [...] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless.

Thats what her cars do," Lula said. "They explode. But I gotta tell you this was the best. This here's the first time she exploded a garbage truck. One time her truck got hit with an antitank missile. That wasn't bad either, but it couldn't compare to this.

A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on the ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly melting.

Don't you go and dump reality on us like a garbage truck.

The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio. On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought, that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really , as they say, the enjoyment of new things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels.

You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curbside, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you're in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth. There are dentists. She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kristen in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.

She used to call me garbage truck

Ter refused to ride buses. The people depressed him, sitting there. He liked Greyhound stations though. We used to go to the ones in San Francisco and Oakland. Mostly Oakland, on San Pablo Avenue. Once he told me he loved me because I was like San Pablo Avenue. He was like the Berkeley dump. I wish there was a bus to the dump. We went there when we got homesick for New Mexico. It is stark and windy and gulls soar like nighthawks in the desert. You can see the sky all around you and above you. Garbage trucks thunder through dust-billowing roads. Gray dinosaurs.

If you can hear the quiet while being woken up by the garbage trucks, you have power. When you can feel the stars when all you can see are the skyscrapers, that's power. When you can smell the forest in front of the dumpster, then you have power. Never let the events in front of you or the people around you, tell you what to see, feel, taste, smell or hear.

When I told him what I’d done, he yelled at me. A man who worked as a driver for the city of Chicago’s sanitation department and spent most of his life communicating with his colleagues over the noise of his garbage truck, he could really yell.

It's all about realizing what you're doing to hold yourself back, like through hatred or fear or nihilism or eating gluten. You identify the things you want, and you finally allow yourself to take them-' William lost the end of her diatribe as a garbage truck rolled by outside

Garbage Is, always. We will die, civilization will crumble, life as we know it will cease to exist, but trash will endure, and there it was on the street, our ceaselessly erected, ceaselessly broken cenotaphs to ephemera and disconnection and unquenchable want.

What’s red and white and red and white and red and white?” Laney tilted her head, considering. “A candy cane?” “That’s one answer, but I’m thinking of something else,” Mark said, grabbing hold of the end of the garbage truck once again. The truck began to move. “Tell me!” yelled Laney at the retreating truck. Mark bellowed the answer. “Santa Claus rolling down a hill!

I hope he falls off a ladder at work.' 'I hope he gets hit by a truck.' 'A garbage truck.' 'Yeah... And all the garbage will fall on his dead body.' 'And then a bus will run him over.' 'I hope I'm on it.

One of the few things that August didn't know about her was that sometimes when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life. You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you're in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth. There are dentists. She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kirsten in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.

According to one study, about 60 percent of all clothing manufactured around the world is discarded within a few years of production. That is equivalent to one garbage truck full of clothes arriving at a landfill every second.

I’ll have one of my men drop a car off for you.” “Thanks. I’ll try not to lose it.” “If you can manage to keep it intact for a week, it’s yours. If it gets stolen, blown up, crushed by a garbage truck, set on fire, filled with cement, or dies an untimely death by any other means, I’ll expect you to spend the night with me.

After you died I could not hold a funeral And so my life became a funeral. Oh, return to me. Oh, return to me when I call your name. Do not delay any longer. Return to me now. After you died I couldn't hold a funeral, So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine. These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine. These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine. The flowers that bloom in spring, the willows, the raindrops and snowflakes became shrines. The morning ushering in each day, the evenings that daily darken, became shrines. After you died I couldn't hold a funeral, so my life became a funeral. After you were wrapped in a tarpaulin and carted away in a garbage truck, After sparkling jets of water sprayed unforgivably from the fountain. Everywhere the lights of the temple shrines are burning. In the flowers that bloom in spring, in the snowflakes. In the evenings that draw each day to a close. Sparks from the candles, burning in empty drinks bottles.

Imagine if we were capable of a form of empathy that lets us know one another by savoring the aura we leave on the things we have touched. We would go to a dump to get drunk on one another's souls.

This is how my day usually goes. I leave the faucet open and know what it’s like to have my fingers around a minuscule whirlpool, and I cry, hoping if I do it for hours the water will end up tasting like the ocean, just so I could get myself half-drowning. I don’t know how to float on water. This is the closest thing I will ever get to breathing without forcing my lungs to turn into a garbage truck, or a car alarm, or anything that can get my neighbors out of their doors. Maybe if I blink my eyes as fast as I can, I will end up having lightning for tears because that’s how much they hurt. There is the constant banging on my door. On my bedside table is an empty mug that was once made with everything close to tasting like beautiful and patient and calm. And I am not. I am stepping on my own leash. my skin has purple circles, my eyes has been spending too many hours pretending to be an Olympic pool, when it’s too little to even be a sink. Last night, I realized, the tap water will never taste like tears, no matter how many hours I spent bending. The banging on my bedroom door will never stop. I wonder how long I can keep this up until I remember that there’s always a limit to pain, and none to love.

The prospect of reusable rockets dramatically lowering the cost of launch fueled the growth, as did the revolution in small satellites. For decades, satellites had been big, as large as a garbage truck, and expensive, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. But now the technology had changed, and like an iPhone, they had shrunk in size, to the size of a shoebox, costing far less. Musk wasn’t the only entrepreneur

But I was still anxious. Trevor Trevor Trevor. I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity. I felt weak. My nerves were frayed and fragile, like tattered silk. Sleep had not yet solved my crankiness, my impatience, my memory. It seemed like everything was now somehow linked to getting back what I'd lost. I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever.

Now the evening's at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in. The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny's and Lindy's - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that's home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: 'New York, New York, it's a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground. Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it's a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There's a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again. Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It's an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get. This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys' nerves get tauter and women's fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the 'Late Show' title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There's a life that's happening here. ("New York Blues")

washing and little food rituals. The battle in the Gospels focuses on those. When Jesus tries to turn it to things that really matter, the scribes and Pharisees go away and ask among themselves, “How can we kill this guy?” It is fascinating to see how bloodthirsty the people around Jesus were, but that’s where the righteousness of the scribe and the Pharisee leaves you. It leaves you trying to manage affairs and make them work out as you think they should in your own strength, and so you need to have a little committee meeting here or get-together there and figure out how to get rid of this guy. Beyond the righteousness of the scribe and the Pharisee is where we experience the kingdom. It’s where we begin to enter interactively into the kind of change that allows us to live constantly in the action of God in our lives. As long as we stick at the level of action and of righteousness identified in terms of action, we will never move on to where the real action of the kingdom of God is. Of course, many people say, “Well, you’re not very sophisticated.” But that’s why Jesus talked about children and said that unless you repent and become like a little child, you won’t enter the kingdom of heaven. You know, we have heard many sermons about how to do that, about how to repent and become like a little child. But that primarily means that we forsake the wisdom of men, of human beings, about how to deal with God. That’s the primary part of becoming a child. A little child runs to the door, hears the garbage truck and says, “I want to be

Oh, Soo-Lin! I must confess, the Westin is nothing like I described in my holiday verse. Where do I begin? All night self-closing doors slam, the plumbing chugs whenever a toilet is flushed, and any time someone takes a shower, it sounds like a teakettle whistling in my ear. Families of foreign tourists save their conversations until they’re standing outside our door. The mini-fridge rattles and hums so much you think it’s about to spring to life. Garbage trucks screech and collect dumpsterfuls of clanging bottles at 1 AM. Then the bars let out, and the streets fill with people yelling at one another in gravelly, drunken voices. All the talk involves cars. “Get in the car.” “I’m not getting in the car.” “Shut up, or you’re not getting in the car.” “Nobody tells me I can’t get into my own car.” That’s a lullaby compared to the alarm clock.

At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine — and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When

You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you’re in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze.

NO, WE DO NOT HAVE PENS! Bring your own. You'll need them. You see, like every other department in the city, Records runs on Almighty Forms. There are forms that tell the Night Mayor's office what we hunters are doing - starting an investigation, ending one, or reaching various points along the way. There are forms that make things happen, from installing rat traps to getting lab work done. There are forms with which to requisition peep-hunting equipment, from tiger cages to Tasers. (The form for commandeering a genuine NYC garbage truck may be thirty-four pages long, but one day I will think of some reason to fill it out, I swear to you.) There are even forms that activate other forms or switch them off, that cause other forms to mutate, thus bringing newly formed forms into the world. Put together, all these forms are the vast spiral of information that defines us, guides our growth, and makes sure our future looks like our past - they are the DNA of the Night Watch.

Outside the basement door was a covered pen that housed a rooster and a seagull. The rooster had been on his way to Colonel Sanders' when he fell off a truck and broke a drumstick. Someone called Carol, as people often do, and she took the rooster into her care. He was hard of moving, but she had hopes for him. He was so new there he did not even have a name. The seagull, on the other hand, had been with her for years. He had one wing. She had picked him up on a beach three hundred miles away. His name was Garbage Belly. --John McPhee, Travels in Georgia (1973)

Poem for My Father You closed the door. I was on the other side, screaming. It was black in your mind. Blacker than burned-out fire. Blacker than poison. Outside everything looked the same. You looked the same. You walked in your body like a living man. But you were not. would you not speak to me for weeks would you hang your coat in the closet without saying hello would you find a shoe out of place and beat me would you come home late would i lose the key would you find my glasses in the garbage would you put me on your knee would you read the bible to me in your smoking jacket after your mother died would you come home drunk and snore would you beat me on the legs would you carry me up the stairs by my hair so that my feet never touch the bottom would you make everything worse to make everything better i believe in god, the father almighty, the maker of heaven, the maker of my heaven and my hell. would you beat my mother would you beat her till she cries like a rabbit would you beat her in a corner of the kitchen while i am in the bathroom trying to bury my head underwater would you carry her to the bed would you put cotton and alcohol on her swollen head would you make love to her hair would you caress her hair would you rub her breasts with ben gay until she stinks would you sleep in the other room in the bed next to me while she sleeps on the pull-out cot would you come on the sheet while i am sleeping. later i look for the spot would you go to embalming school with the last of my mother's money would i see your picture in the book with all the other black boys you were the handsomest would you make the dead look beautiful would the men at the elks club would the rich ladies at funerals would the ugly drunk winos on the street know ben pretty ben regular ben would your father leave you when you were three with a mother who threw butcher knives at you would he leave you with her screaming red hair would he leave you to be smothered by a pillow she put over your head would he send for you during the summer like a rich uncle would you come in pretty corduroys until you were nine and never heard from him again would you hate him would you hate him every time you dragged hundred pound cartons of soap down the stairs into white ladies' basements would you hate him for fucking the woman who gave birth to you hate him flying by her house in the red truck so that other father threw down his hat in the street and stomped on it angry like we never saw him (bye bye to the will of grandpa bye bye to the family fortune bye bye when he stompled that hat, to the gold watch, embalmer's palace, grandbaby's college) mother crying silently, making floating island sending it up to the old man's ulcer would grandmother's diamonds close their heartsparks in the corner of the closet yellow like the eyes of cockroaches? Old man whose sperm swims in my veins, come back in love, come back in pain.

Good luck with everything. Oh, the world will treat at least half of you like half a person at best, not worth any investment cause you’re already damaged and undereducated and emotionally weird, even though yeah, they can see something kind of great in you, but isn’t it just a losing battle, throwing good money after bad? Your environment is so fucked that your behavior gets more and more impossible, till society claims they can hardly use you for anything but its lowest tasks—an orderly at an old folks’ home, garbage-truck guy—and you’ll barely support yourself. BUT you could try this little piece of candy you put in a pipe, and you’ll be beamed into white light and heavenly love, which will in five minutes turn into a greater problem than you ever knew, so you’ll then have a new problem to solve, and you’ll solve it by doing things you never dreamed of doing. Good luck with that!

Hence that state of mind at once gloomy and euphoric which one associates with carrying out the rubbish; and the way we see the men who go by emptying the bins into their pulping truck not just as emissaries for the chthonic world, gravediggers of the inanimate, Charons of a beyond of greasy paper and rusty tin, but as angels too, as indispensable mediators between ourselves and the heaven of ideas in which we undeservedly soar (or imagine we soar) and which can exist only in so far as we are not overwhelmed by the waste which every act of living incessantly produces (even the act of thinking: these thoughts of mine that you are reading being all that been salvaged from the scores of sheets of paper now crumpled up in the bin), heralds of a possible salvation beyond the destruction inherent in all production and consumption, liberators from the weight of time’s detritus, ponderous dark angels of lightness and clarity.

Ohio hadn’t gone through the same real estate boom as the Sun Belt, but the vultures had circled the carcasses of dying industrial towns––Dayton, Toledo, Mansfield, Youngstown, Akron––peddling home equity loans and refinancing. All the garbage that blew up in people’s faces the same way subprime mortgages had. A fleet of nouveau riche snake oil salesmen scoured the state, moving from minority hoods where widowed, churchgoing black ladies on fixed incomes made for easy marks to the white working-class enclaves and then the first-ring suburbs. The foreclosures began to crop up and then turn into fields of fast-moving weeds, reducing whole neighborhoods to abandoned husks or drug pens. Ameriquest, Countrywide, CitiFinancial––all those devious motherfuckers watching the state’s job losses, plant closings, its struggles, its heartache, and figuring out a way to make a buck on people’s desperation. Every city or town in the state had big gangrenous swaths that looked like New Canaan, the same cancer-patient-looking strip mall geography with brightly lit outposts hawking variations on usurious consumer credit. Those entrepreneurs saw the state breaking down like Bill’s truck, and they moved in, looking to sell the last working parts for scrap.

On our second date, I picked up Missy at her house and told her we had to make a pit stop to pick up crawfish bait at the fish market. We’d figured out a way to speed up the process by using the fish market’s gutbuckets instead of running nets ourselves. Through trial and error, we determined that the best crawfish bait was buffalo-fish heads. Unfortunately, when I pulled up to the market to get the garbage cans full of fish heads, I realized they had been outside for a couple of days. It was a warm day, and I could tell from the buzzing of hundreds of flies it was going to be nasty! I knew it was going to be the ultimate test of our relationship. The tubs were too heavy for one man to carry, so I told Missy, “I’m going to need your help on this.” She crawled out the window, and I led her to the trash cans filled with buffalo heads waiting for us. Like an idiot, the first thing she did was open the lid of a trash can. Immediately, she started gagging and dry-heaving in the parking lot. “Rule number two,” I said. “Never pop the lid on a trash can.” Much to my surprise, Missy regained her composure and helped me load the trash cans into the back of my truck. Right then, I realized our relationship might work out. She was climbing through windows and hauling fish heads.

Ionic is the ‘opposites attract’ chemical bond,” Elizabeth explained as she emerged from behind the counter and began to sketch on an easel. “For instance, let’s say you wrote your PhD thesis on free market economics, but your husband rotates tires for a living. You love each other, but he’s probably not interested in hearing about the invisible hand. And who can blame him, because you know the invisible hand is libertarian garbage.” She looked out at the audience as various people scribbled notes, several of which read “Invisible hand: libertarian garbage.” “The point is, you and your husband are completely different and yet you still have a strong connection. That’s fine. It’s also ionic.” She paused, lifting the sheet of paper over the top of the easel to reveal a fresh page of newsprint. “Or perhaps your marriage is more of a covalent bond,” she said, sketching a new structural formula. “And if so, lucky you, because that means you both have strengths that, when combined, create something even better. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine, what do we get? Water—or H2O as it’s more commonly known. In many respects, the covalent bond is not unlike a party—one that’s made better thanks to the pie you made and the wine he brought. Unless you don’t like parties—I don’t—in which case you could also think of the covalent bond as a small European country, say Switzerland. Alps, she quickly wrote on the easel, + a Strong Economy = Everybody Wants to Live There. In a living room in La Jolla, California, three children fought over a toy dump truck, its broken axle lying directly adjacent to a skyscraper of ironing that threatened to topple a small woman, her hair in curlers, a small pad of paper in her hands. Switzerland, she wrote. Move. “That brings us to the third bond,” Elizabeth said, pointing at another set of molecules, “the hydrogen bond—the most fragile, delicate bond of all. I call this the ‘love at first sight’ bond because both parties are drawn to each other based solely on visual information: you like his smile, he likes your hair. But then you talk and discover he’s a closet Nazi and thinks women complain too much. Poof. Just like that the delicate bond is broken. That’s the hydrogen bond for you, ladies—a chemical reminder that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are.” She walked

Autophagy also plays an important role in the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s is characterized by the abnormal accumulation of amyloid beta (Aß) proteins in the brain, and it’s believed that these accumulations eventually destroy the synaptic connections in the memory and cognition areas. Normally, clumps of Aß protein are removed by autophagy: the brain cell activates the autophagosome, the cell’s internal garbage truck, which engulfs the Aß protein targeted for removal and excretes it, so it can be removed by the blood and recycled into other protein or turned into glucose, depending upon the body’s needs. But in Alzheimer’s disease, autophagy is impaired and the Aß protein remains inside the brain cell, where eventual buildup will result in the clinical syndromes of Alzheimer’s disease. Cancer is yet another disease that may be a result of disordered autophagy. We’re learning that mTOR plays a role in cancer biology, and mTOR inhibitors have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of various cancers. Fasting’s role in inhibiting mTOR, thereby stimulating autophagy, provides an interesting opportunity to prevent cancer’s development.

fasting also stimulates growth hormone, which signals the production of some new snazzy cell parts, giving our bodies a complete renovation. Since it triggers both the breakdown of old cellular parts and the creation of new ones, fasting may be considered one of the most potent anti-aging methods in existence. Autophagy also plays an important role in the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s is characterized by the abnormal accumulation of amyloid beta (Aß) proteins in the brain, and it’s believed that these accumulations eventually destroy the synaptic connections in the memory and cognition areas. Normally, clumps of Aß protein are removed by autophagy: the brain cell activates the autophagosome, the cell’s internal garbage truck, which engulfs the Aß protein targeted for removal and excretes it, so it can be removed by the blood and recycled into other protein or turned into glucose, depending upon the body’s needs. But in Alzheimer’s disease, autophagy is impaired and the Aß protein remains inside the brain cell, where eventual buildup will result in the clinical syndromes of Alzheimer’s disease. Cancer is yet another disease that may be a result of disordered autophagy. We’re learning that mTOR plays a role in cancer biology, and mTOR inhibitors have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of various cancers. Fasting’s role in inhibiting mTOR, thereby stimulating autophagy, provides an interesting opportunity to prevent cancer’s development. Indeed, some leading scientists, such as Dr. Thomas Seyfried, a professor of biology at Boston College, have proposed a yearly seven-day water-only fast for this very reason.

Your 20s are great, but then your 30s come around the corner like a garbage truck in a 5 a.m

The boys reached the woods as night fell. “It’s so dark in here I couldn’t see Buck if he flew past my nose in a garbage truck,” said Casper.

At its lowest and most common level the “God has a plan” folks are those who settle for the least comforting of cold comforts. Why did little Johnny get run over by the garbage truck in the alley? Because God has a plan. There. Feel better now? And at its highest and most rarified level a plateful of blood-rare metaphysics provides a chewy, fragrant, vitamin-packed repast for the mind/heart willing to dig in and feast.

These things smell like a garbage truck had a baby with a dog food factory on a hot summer day.” I nodded. “They’re known for their stench. We’ll get you out of there.” I wasn’t sure how, though.

It wasn’t something I had expected her to say. The bars, yes, I could understand. There were more than a few times I’d woken up in an ally to the beeping of a garbage truck, the dawn light like needles in my eyes, no idea how I’d gotten on that pile of musty cardboard, those memories permanently blotted from my brain. I knew how close I’d come to losing it all, to joining Billie on the other side, but I was better now. Or at least better enough to get through the day. But the asylum? That was a whole other level of mental instability, a level I’d been at only once in my life. It was a low blow.

In life I'd heard of dogs like her, cheap burglar alarms. Solitary, lonely, they bark at passerby and garbage trucks from behind high fences in exchange for water and kibble when the people remember to feed and water them. They bark out of fear. And to remind themselves that they in fact exist.

The light indicating the bathroom is occupied clicks off and the fabulous Gigi Fandone saunters back to stage side. A heavy smell follows her. It's a smell much like the trenches in the zoo, but worse. It's a smell much like Detroit's septic system, but worse. It's a smell much like a diaper disposal truck, but worse.

i wish i could clean up the mess that i made of myself pack it up in boxes drop it off at the thrift store fill garbage bags with my self-criticism rent a dumpster to toss out the insults i throw at myself have a trash fire kindled with unrequited love and all the longing i do that lasts for too long is it thursday already don’t let the garbage truck leave i’m not finished yet i just need a little more time to get this messed cleaned up

I didn’t have a garbage truck that showed up on my front sidewalk each week to take away my waste.

Garbage truck beepers belong in a symphony. Or would that really put the phony in symphony?

hate being alone, but when I wake up in some guy's bed with dry come on the sheets underneath me and he's snoring like a garbage truck, I go, let me out of here. I slip out and crawl around the floor groping for my clothes, trying to untangle his blue jeans from mine, my bra from his Jockeys—Skip wears boxers, of course—and trying to be quiet at the same time, then slide out the door laughing like a seal escaping from the zoo and race home to where Jeannie has been warming the bed all night. Jumping in between the sheets and she wakes up and

It also had extraordinary acoustics: in the hush of the small hours, a goods truck smashing into a pothole sounded like an explosion, and the fantastic howl of a passing motorbike once caused Rachel to vomit with terror. Around the clock, ambulances sped eastward on West 23rd Street with a sobbing escort of police motorcycles. Sometimes I confused the cries of the sirens with my son's night-time cries. I would leap out of bed and go to his bedroom and helplessly kiss him, even though my rough face sometimes woke him and I'd have to stay with him and rub his tiny rigid back until he fell asleep once more. Afterwards I slipped out onto the balcony and stood there like a sentry. The pallor of the so-called hours of darkness was remarkable. Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross-streets glowed as if each held a dawn. The tail lights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit storefronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to my mind the mad thought that the final twilight was upon New York.

The Law of the Garbage Truck,” was this: “Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. So when someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Believe me, you’ll be happier.

In the middle of April 1945, we paid for three spaces on a truck, that would take a few families to the border. The night before we left, all three knapsacks ready, we looked around the house: the furniture in the dining room and bedroom, all brought by the parents from Vienna, the beautiful grandfather clock that had to be wound once a month - all these were part of our lives. Father, without saying a word, opened the clock, cut through the spring, took the two beautifully engraved, gilded weights and threw them in the garbage. He did not want anybody to enjoy that clock, that was brought from Vienna in 1918 and was chiming the quarter, half and the hours for our entire life, in good times and bad. It was the only spiteful act that I ever saw him perform, this quiet, gentle man.

If you are easily upset, don’t continue year after year that way. If you allow little things like long lines, the weather, a grumpy salesman, or an inconsiderate receptionist to steal your joy, draw a line in the sand. Say, “You know what? That’s it. I’m not giving away my power anymore. I’m staying calm, cool, and collected. David J. Pollay, author of The Law of the Garbage Truck, was in a New York City taxicab when a car jumped out from a parking place right in front of it. His cabbie had to slam on the brakes, the car skidded, and the tires squealed, but the taxi stopped an inch from the other car. The driver of the other car whipped his head around, and honked and screamed in anger. But David was surprised when his cabbie just smiled real big, and waved at him. David said, “That man almost totaled your cab and sent us to the hospital. I can’t believe you didn’t yell back at him. How were you able to keep your cool?” The cab driver’s response, which David calls, “The Law of the Garbage Truck,” was this: “Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. So when someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Believe me, you’ll be happier.” Successful people don’t allow garbage trucks to unload on them. If somebody dumps a load on you, don’t be upset. Don’t be angry. Don’t be offended. If you make that mistake, you’ll end up carrying their loads around and eventually you’ll dump them on somebody else. Keep your lid on. Sometimes you may need to have a steel lid. These days, though, so many people are dumping out poison through criticism, bad news, and anger, you’ll need to keep that lid on tight. We can’t stop people from dumping their garbage, but by keeping our lids on, we can tell them to recycle instead!

The acetaminophen in Tylenol binds to a powerful antioxidant called glutathione, which acts as a garbage truck for our cells, carting away free radicals and toxins as part of the body’s detoxification process. But acetaminophen irreversibly binds glutathione and reduces its cell-scrubbing abilities, especially in areas demanding high glutathione, like the brain and liver.11,12 Acetaminophen toxicity has replaced viral hepatitis as the most common cause of acute liver failure and is the second most common cause of liver failure requiring transplantation.13 Yikes.

It could be worse,” I say to myself. “Be thankful you’re here and not riding on the back of a garbage truck.

There are worse effects than “coke bugs” for the cocaine abuser. Symptoms very similar to those of paranoid schizophrenia – almost identical with them, in fact – often appear. William S. Burroughs, for example, tells of a friend who got the copper horrors (visions of policemen) while sniffing too much coke. Just like a madman in a joke, this fellow ran into the alley and hid his head in a garbage can, evidently convinced that this made him totally invisible. (Again, the logic of amphetamine is similar. DeRopp, in Drugs and the Mind, tells of a truck driver who took so much Benzedrine that he became convinced “Benny” was driving the truck and therefore crawled into the back to have a nap. “Benny” drove him into a ditch, but he survived to tell the tale.)

Yet, there is no such push to get more women into coal mines, offshore drilling, or on garbage trucks.

He’s my hyung,’ Baldspot said. ‘I didn’t know you had an older brother.’ ‘He fell off a garbage truck!’ he said with a giggle. ‘Well now, what can’t you get from a garbage truck these days?’ the woman chuckled.

Việc tâm sự giúp mọi người hiểu được vấn đề đang khiến bạn bận tâm, giúp bạn vượt qua phút chao đảo, yếu đuối khi bạn muốn nhận được sự cảm thông của người khác. Còn "xả rác" là trút sang người khác cảm giác nặng nề bởi chính các vấn đề của bạn.

Cuộc sống luôn chuyển động. Cách bạn kết luận về một sự việc sẽ chi phối cách phản ứng của bạn với sự việc tiếp theo. Cách bạn đối xử với một người sẽ chi phối cách ứng xử của người đó với người khác nữa. Cứ thế, nguồn năng lượng - cả tích cực lẫn tiêu cực - sẽ lan truyền từ người này sang người khác. Khi bạn tha thứ lỗi lầm của một ai đó, bạn đã tạo ra một làn sóng những cảm xúc tốt đẹp. Khi bạn trừng phạt họ bằng lời nói hoặc hành động, bạn đã nhân rộng những cảm giác tiêu cực.

Có những người giống như "chiếc xe rác" vậy: Họ chứa trong mình đầy "rác rưởi" - sự thất vọng, tức giận và chán nản. Và tất nhiên họ phải tìm chỗ để trút bỏ mớ rác rưởi đó. Nếu thấy họ trút lên bạn thì bạn đừng đón nhận. Hãy mỉm cười, vẫy chào, chúc họ vui, rồi tiếp tục công việc của mình. Cứ tin tôi đi, rồi bạn sẽ thấy hạnh phúc hơn.

Nothing is ever simple with you. Men blow themselves up. Cars get flattened by garbage trucks. I’ve been in full-scale invasions that have been less harrowing than meeting you for coffee.

Most living entities and systems on this planet obviously do not live by the Western human clock (though some, like the crows who memorize a city's daily garbage truck route, do of course adapt to the timing of human activities). To watch a brown creeper as it inches up and down, peering into crevices and extracting bugs with its little dentist beak, is thus a way of catching a ride out of the grid and toward a time sense so different that it is barely imaginable to us. In Jennifer Ackerman's book The Bird Way, I learned that the male black manakin, a South American songbird, can do somersaults so fast that a human can see them only in slowed-down video. Some birdsong contains notes that are sung too quickly or are too high-pitched for us to hear. Veeries, a species related to the American robin, can predict hurricanes months in advance and adjust their migration route accordingly, and no one currently knows how. Birds own bodies and their movements are an entanglement of time and space: If a loon is in the higher latitudes, it's summer, and the bird is mostly black with a striking pattern of white stripes. If the same loon is near my studio in Oakland, it's winter, and the bird is almost unrecognizably different, a dull grayish brown.

After you died I couldn’t hold a funeral, so my life became a funeral. After you were wrapped in a tarpaulin and carted away in a garbage truck. After sparkling jets of water sprayed unforgivably from the fountain. Everywhere the lights of the temple shrines are burning. In the flowers that bloom in spring, in the snowflakes. In the evenings that draw each day to a close. Sparks from the candles, burning in empty drinks bottles.

Seriously? Where would someone put that? I'd need a kooch the size of a garbage truck to enjoy that.

Yogurt is good for you. And it’s just one spoon,” Sharpcot had replied, but this stack summoned a billion voices, all of them saying in a chorus, “Just one spoon.” From kids’ lunches and store shelves and desk drawers and airline meal packs, in every country of the world: Canada and the United States and Nicaragua and Uruguay and Argentina and Ireland and Burkina Faso and Russia and Papua New Guinea and New Zealand and very probably the Antarctic. Where wasn’t there disposable cutlery? Plastic spoons in endless demand, in endless supply, from factory floors where they are manufactured and packaged in boxes of 10 or 20 or 100 or 1000 or individually in clear wrap, boxed on skids and trucked to trains freighting them to port cities and onto giant container ships plying the seas to international ports to intercity transport trucks to retail delivery docks for grocery stores and retail chains, supplying restaurants and homes, consumers moving them from shelf to cart to bag to car to house, where they are stuck in the lunches of the children of polluting parents, or used once each at a birthday party to serve ice cream to four-year-olds where only some are used but who knows which? So used and unused go together in the trash, or every day one crammed into a hipster’s backpack to eat instant pudding at his software job in an open-concept walkup in a gentrified neighbourhood, or handed out from food trucks by the harbour, or set in a paper cup at a Costco table for customers to sample just one bite of this exotic new flavour, and so they go into trash bins and dumpsters and garbage trucks and finally vast landfill sites or maybe just tossed from the window of a moving car or thrown over the rail of a cruise ship to sink in the ocean deep.

It was a giant dumpster fire sitting on top of a garbage truck that was also on fire.

How come Fred has a donkey and a garbage truck? That’s very weird,” said Nana. “Fred is a vet. A vet is an animal doctor, Basil,” explained Unkie Herb. “He also has a farm where he takes care of animals, like Puddles, that are hurt or have no home. He needs a garbage truck to keep his farm clean because animals are very messy. Basil and I always give him money to help him buy food or medicine for the animals.” “Gosh, that’s really cool!” said Grandma. “How wonderful,” said Mom. “Wow,” said Dad. “What a kind man.” “Yep,” said Unkie Herb. “Not weird at all.

During a visit to the county landfill, I parked my truck in front of a junk heap and stared. As I meditated on the garbage piled as high as a demolished apartment building, it struck me that everything in this gigantic entangled mass was once new. State-of-the-art. An object of want. There were BBQ grills, bikes, toys, lawn furniture, stoves, picture frames, wine racks; it was a graveyard of past desires, a swollen scrap heap of residually accumulated consumption. Then I thought: Someone once opened their wallet, swiped a credit card, and bought this stuff. And now, here it lies as worthless junk, while its debt probably remains.

issue. Glass has four times the environmental footprint of plastic.8 So swapping out a single disposable plastic drink bottle for a disposable glass drink bottle will only serve to increase your environmental impact. Glass recycling still faces many hurdles and is not as simple as the ‘infinitely recyclable’ tag line it comes with.  Glass breaks easily in garbage trucks and is frequently dumped in landfill because broken glass is not sorted for recycling.

If you want to tell your husband how much he means to you, what do you do? Do you give him gold?” “He would no doubt prefer that.” “If you gave him garbage trucks filled with gold, you would give only empty riches. To convey true love, Sang Ly, you whisper . . .” She waits for me to fill in the answer. “Words.” “What words? What would you say to him?” “I guess I would say, I love you.” “Three words, Sang Ly, three simple words that communicate more, mean more, than worldly riches. Words provide a voice to our deepest feelings. I tell you, words have started and stopped wars. Words have built and lost fortunes. Words have saved and taken lives. Words have won and lost great kingdoms. Even Buddha said, ‘Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care, for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.’ Do you understand?” “I

a shrewd and tawdry city, shining like toyland between the swamps and the sea. The night was weighted with derelicts and dancers, terminal breathing in wards, clenched fists of women as they pushed each time the pains came, chips in perfect alignment on green felt as men thumbed up the corners of the hole cards just enough to read the news, giggling young men in a chickenwire apartment painting the body of one of their chums a lovely gold, ambulances and tow trucks moving away in separate directions with a load of torn flesh or a load of ripped metal, thousands and thousands of picture tubes all telling the same jokes at the same instant to a hundred thousand living rooms, frantic rumps ram-packing the beach sand under the spread towelling, the simultaneous squirts of red tomato and yellow mustard in a hundred different places to disguise the flannelly taste of fried meat, a thousand simultaneous sobbings, thrashings, swallowings, vomitings, ejaculations, coughings, scratchings, cursings, shy touchings, whisperings, kickings. . . . He had never considered himself particularly imaginative. Never before had he felt this way about a city, and he knew that it could only be possible in a strange city, and at a time when grief and uncertainty and introspection had sharpened and heightened awareness. This great Gold Coast became a gigantic cruise ship moving through time rather than space, constantly assimilating the foods, the newborn, the gadgetry, spewing aft the unending tonnage of garbage and waste and dead bodies and broken toys, rolling imperceptibly in the slow tides of history, the passengers unaware that no city is forever, that it will end one day and the eternality of time will cover it in a silence of dust, sand and vines.

O Goodness, I didn't know there were such repulsive holes! My hairy holes! Creases of my stomach Hair-like cilia in my nostrils Finger-like villi in my small intestine Pubic hair of love Hair sprouts up inside the holes and ripples like water plants. Holes are neatneatly piled inside a steaming stomach. The wet and most poisonous snakes in the world pant. Fill us up! Fill us up with the outside! Delicious outside! When hair whines like the fingers that reach out towards the refugee-aid bread truck someone picks up a brass instrument and wails at the sky praising the blueness. Holes of the world, open up your lids and howl!

Daily Bread by Stewart Stafford Butcher short-changed me again, There’s sawdust in the sausages, Grocer’s growing grosser and then, A proposition with my messages. The driving instructor’s pissed on bends, I went and told his mother, The barman’s watering down pints for friends Like he’s feeding his baby brother. The barber’s still one hair off, One side doesn’t match the other, Bookie won’t take my bets and lends, The landlord another sucker. Tossed out in the street to fend for myself, With all the other refuse, Garbage man fills his truck with me, At least I still have one use. © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.

My feelings about you now are those of anger and indignation; and they enable me to tell you a lot of things straight from the shoulder, without my usual tongue tied round-aboutness. You might as well take all your own literature and everyone else’s and toss it into one of those big garbage trucks of the Sanitation Department, so long as the people with the top-cream minds and the “finer” sensibilities use those minds and sensibilities not to make themselves more humane human beings than the average person, but merely as means of ducking responsibility toward a better understanding of their fellow men, except theoretically—

On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday’s Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia’s opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of removing the residue of yesterday’s existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion, perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think about them further.

The boom brought an increase of crime, drug use, and damage to sacred tribal lands. Industry trucks dumped toxic fluid into ditches by the road or unloaded radioactive waste, a byproduct of fracking, into garbage bins and backyards.

barns. Hinged on their sides and latched in the center, the old garage doors swung open into the alley. No electric door openers, no remote controls. Drivers parked in the alley, got out and opened the swinging doors, then returned to their cars to pull inside. Beside each garage were garbage cans, waiting for the garbage trucks that still rumbled down the cinder alleys. Molded plastic garbage cans, some with small plastic wheels, had replaced the dented sheet metal cans that our parents had used. The plastic cans lasted longer, and they didn’t rust, but you lost

The night is the frenetic fox darting across a roadway in a flash of orange. It is being tailed by the police for a whole fucking mile, with both hands firmly wrapped about the steering wheel. It is spying a shooting star blinking across the horizon, and everybody saying did- you-see-that. The bustling truck-stops. and the blotter- dark nights, when driving safely seems difficult. The fush-fush of cars speeding ahead in an overpass highway. The bloated raccoon knocking the garbage cans over and the waddling lamp-eyed possum strolling past, within a few feet even, as you sit on the front porch and smoke. It is drunken talk at 1 AM, conversation of substance, depth and style, when all errant ideas are concocted. It is fanning motor-heat lathering the chest and skinny legs in the cold car. Sudden, abrupt episodes of fatigue that make you retire to bed earlier than usual. This is the night given to snapshot, light-bath revelations that sends one running for notepad and pen, and repeating, out loud, the premise over and over as you stride. The night is a strange, curdling scream at 3 am, wondering if it is a cat, a coyote, a baby.

He said that every day without a fail when he commuted on the packed buses he saw city garbage trucks leaving on their rounds several at a time. Shin-ae understands what her husband is saying. She wonders how many souls a day are loaded into those garbage trucks and then disposed of. (Cho 2006: 16)

I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever.