Raw-dogging it
I left the apartment and walked onto the porch to tie my shoes. I looked toward the road and saw our trash bin, open, on the side of the road, near the kudzu. It is trash day and the trash was already picked up. It has been raining, and I was concerned about the trash can being left open because now, my fear of our trash can filling up with water was undoubtedly being realized.
I told Sam, “I’ve got to get that, I’m going out there to get that, come pick me up.” He went to my car and started the car as I walked toward the road to investigate the trash bin situation. I was really disgusted to find a shallow pool of water in the bottom of the bin, but I was equally annoyed that near our neighbor’s trash bins, some forgotten/overflowing/left behind trash was sitting in the road, so I felt compelled to clean it up. I picked up a plastic fast-food style cup lid, a straw, and a shiny, wet Sundrop soda bottle that was probably 25% full of liquid, presumably Sundrop soda. I threw the items into one of the neighbor’s bins and only briefly felt guilty/ashamed about throwing the items into the bin “naked” or un-bagged, but I already entered a mental state which I can only describe as “raw-dogging it” in order to force myself to finish what I started.
I opened our bin’s lid to investigate the situation further and found some ants crawling around near the lip of the lid. They formed lines, following each other around the lid and maybe down deeper into the bin. The ants didn’t bother me much because I already saw them last night when I threw a bag in the bin before I wheeled it to the end of the driveway (also, they are just ants). At the bottom of the bin was still the pool of water and a discarded Reese’s candy bar wrapper. I looked around near the other bins at this moment and saw some maggots crawling on the ground near my shoes and near the neighbor’s bins. Something putrid was really stinking the area up. I opened one of the neighbor’s bins again and saw probably 15-20 white maggots crawling around inside the bin.
I held the lid to our bin and tipped the entire thing into the kudzu. I didn’t hear much water sloshing about, so I grabbed the wheel in order to execute a lifting maneuver, creating an appropriate angle which could facilitate the emptying of the bin’s collection of dirty water. I heard some sloshing of water pour out into the kudzu, and held the angle for approximately 10 more seconds to ensure complete drainage. I felt relief when I hoisted the bin back up, looked inside, and saw only mild to moderate wetness—no longer was there a pool of dirty water.
Sam was already at the entrance of the driveway, but I now had to wheel the bin back to where we keep it on non-trash pickup days, near the stairs to our porch. He put the car in reverse so I could pass, and I said, “What are you doing, where are you going? Where are you going?” I said this in a silly southern accent, like, “Where you goin’, shug?”
I felt deeply contaminated at this point and wanted to wash my hands but was still “raw-dogging” it and did not want to inconvenience Sam by having him remove the keys from the ignition in order to give me the keys to the apartment. I bent over near some overgrown grass and swept my hands back and forth, back and forth, using the moisture from the rain on the blades of grass as a sort of primitive cleansing ritual. I felt moderately consoled that the friction from the blades of grass against my hands would remove any potentially life-threatening contaminants, but what actually happened is that my hands got wet and covered in what I believed to be some sort of grass seed or weed seed or flower seed, little black kernels that looked like wild rice only smaller. Sam said it looked like a bunch of little bugs and he started to turn the keys in the ignition, readying himself for the inconvenience that would have allowed me to wash my hands.
I told him I was fine and began wiping my hands with a scented face and body wipe I found in my glovebox.