Skip to main content

Burning trash

 
I had a good blaze going last night from my monthly pile of trash. This picture is from after it burned down quite a bit. Burning trash (as well as littering) is strangely thrilling. There's not much else to do with it--there are no dumps, and I don't want to bury things where people drink the water right out of the ground. Yet so many unspoken codes are being broken I feel almost criminal, in a good way.

At first, I started a small fire in case the plastic didn't want to burn. Then I upended my fridge's cardboard box with most of the trash in it over the top. This sealed well at the ground, making a square pillar of trash with the fire at the bottom. I thought it would smoulder slowly for a while, but after a couple seconds it burned like a gas flare. For a few moments the sides of the box contained it, and the fire poured out the top like the tresses of some demonic Rapunzel.

I wished that I had my camera, but I didn't want to miss it, and sure enough, it died down in only a couple minutes. Does taking a picture of something that beautiful and ephemeral cheapen its essence? Perhaps some of the beauty is due to the sheer transitory nature of flame. Still, I would get a lot of pleasure from posting a cool picture online, even if some fairy thing I couldn't see had to be imprisoned to do it. Maybe I'm just selfish.

Ruminations like this should be punctured. So in any case, with the box I think I acheived a much higher average temperature and burned most of my trash with much less soot and carcinogens than the average.
Posted by Picasa

Comments

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that

Internet Writing and the Content Vacuum

It's been a few times now I've had full weekday control of the Monthly 's headline blog, Political Animal, and I feel like I have a decent idea now what it's like being at the top level of blogging. (Not to say that I am  at the top level, of course, just that I've walked in those shoes for a few days and gotten some blisters.) Anyway, the first thing I've noticed is that it is really, really hard to do well. I've had days before when I just didn't have anything to do and ended up at home writing 4-5 posts in one day on this site, but pro blogging is an entirely different beast. The expectation is that during the day you will write 10-12 posts. This includes an intro music video, a lunch links post, and evening links and/or video. So that means 7-9 short, punchy essays on something , with maybe 1-2 of those being longer and more worked out thoughts. This ferocious demand for content is both good and bad. The iron weight of responsibiliy—the knowledge