Recycling in Hell. Anyone who visits the overrated (and now amazingly treeless due to PG&E's secret war against old growth Eucalyptus) Central Coast, and hangs around long enough, will eventually notice beleaguered congeries of tri-tip eaters lined up before roll-off storage units randomly placed in various shopping center parking lots to do their recycling. These are generally presided over by some scruffy, ill-tempered underemployed or unemployed ruffian determined to get his last nickel out of the CA Redemption Code Racket as the sole beneficiary by adverse possession if nothing else. Nowadays, one can't even scrounge a drink of water without having to cope with some sort of rebate scam. That's the befuddling complexity to which we have been brought by the desertification of any sort of civility in human relations in the name of financial profit. "Why?" I ask, do they endure such abuse for their good intentions? I'll tell you. None of them are man enough to face the existential truth - to do as I do, and recycle in hell itself at Waste Management.
To describe Waste Management is to give a thumbnail sketch of the underbelly of Western Civilization - a rotting corpse of dreams and aspirations vitiated and worm-holed by the corruption of the institutions we created to realize them. For the uninitiated, finding the entrance to WM can be a problem. Although the address is listed on Betteravia, which it fronts to the southwest (I think), the entrance is actually on the street which forks off of Betteravia about 300 yards to the east(?) ... anyway, this requires you to make a 90 degree, sharp and dangerous, left into the facility, against unregulated commercial/agricultural traffic, onrushing at speeds often in excess of 90 mph. Please, be aware that WM closes the gate at 4:30 PM, otherwise you will have to detour several miles down the road, go left on Black for several more, turn left up Betteravia for several more, all the while having accomplished nothing.
Once inside the facility you should see signs, a few arrows pointing you in the direction of the recycling section. Be grateful for little things. It wasn't always that way. In the 'old' days, there were ... no signs. Rather, a gauntlet of large dumpsters confronted the visitor, in no apparent order, but strewn all over the place akimbo, at various angles. Some were stacked on top of one another. As we know, dumpsters are set at an angle at the top - and yes, some were either in the process of sliding off, or had done so already, either face down on the pavement, in a pile of whatever was in them, or standing on their sides, the doors swung open. The idea here, I deduce now, was to encourage you to get going fast, even though you did not know where you were going, because there is no turning around once you're in there.
Times have changed. You may run into a pile of bashed in big screens from defunct home entertainment centers, or crunch the severed limbs of some poor battered Barbi, a crumpled George Foreman grill, etc., but somewhere along the line the owners got the message that they might take the "M" part of their logo more seriously, and like Milton's Satan came to see even under these conditions, one must get organized to make a buck. Now you cross this amorphous, grey zone, a wall of dumpsters to the right (if they're stacked, they're three rows back), point left, you'll come to what can only be called "the bottleneck". Understand, chances are - you're going to spend sometime here.
My advice: stay in your vehicle, windows closed and doors locked, particularly if you brought kids. First of all, the place stinks. Santa Maria itself is no olfactory extravaganza, but on a bad, hot day, there are few places north of LAX than can match the noisome WM for sheer nausea creation. Secondly, if your kid is small enough, you may never see her/him again if let to run free. Strap 'em in at gunpoint if necessary. Then, there is the interminable din of this machine housed in the central building. What the purpose of this machine is, I have been unable to ascertain. But there is a conveyor belt which transports objects up to the size of a small child and dumps them into a chute ... another reason to take my caveat here seriously, as the place is only sporadically attended to. Finally, the wind. For those who know the Central Coast, the winds here can rage, especially in the afternoon, and at WM, they can be furious, carrying all that grit you definitely do not want to inhale.
Once one reaches the bottleneck, one finds oneself in sort of a ravine surrounded by mountains, often thirty feet high, of recyclables and trash - same stuff as the mountains found in every theme park which is what WM really is - a five star reality theme park. Like Dogen's mountains, they are endlessly moving, helped along by a posse of D-3's. Among these mountains, endlessly moving, I sit and reflect upon my residence on earth. What's really going on? read more
