hen I hear the garbage truck out in the street pause in front of my house, when I hear the rubber thump of the trash bins against the strong metal lip of the receptacle, I actually hear two clogs of a machine greater than I am coming together to complete a process, an agreement between myself and my city to keep material moving through the invisible veins of bin, street, and truck.

But then when I pull the bins off the sidewalk and into my backyard only to find that there are still pizza boxes at the bottom grotesquely married to a hilly landscape of white fuzzy mold where there should be clean emptiness, I realize that everything is falling apart and that we’re fighting a losing battle. When the cogs cannot meet successfully, when apathetic chaos bubbles up at such a fundamental level, it becomes obvious that the entire machine is not only ready to collapse but is looking for ways to do so.

For now, I’ll leave the pizza boxes in there and cross my fingers that they’ll be gone after the next pick-up. After all, miracles have happened before.