Let's stay with the filth, for now

Yes, let's stay with the issue of rubbish, for this post. The garbage here, like everything else, is extraordinary. I guess that most people in the civilized world have some sort of orderly trash removal system. The system here appears to be "throw all your shit in a steaming heap outside your place of business and hope to Christ it's gone in the morning." It does make stepping out a little less elegant as you step around walls of reeking Glad bags, but then, you did want to see New York.

To be fair, it appears that the garbage fairies do come in the middle of the night, and in fact we observed some of them hurling yards of galvanized steel ducting (still shiny and new) into a standard-issue garbage truck. They stood there, staring with bovine lack of interest, as the truck's compacting machinery tried repeatedly and ineffectively to digest it. We watched a different set of men and machines effect a similar but more expeditious disposal of a perfectly good office desk a few days later.

It would take a broader knowledge of North American cities than I possess to make a confident judgement, but there does seem to be a West Coast (very loosely defined) attitude toward rubbish and recycling, and I suppose I've lived near Vancouver long enough to have become indoctrinated. But for such a constantly re-inventing and go-go-go place, this city's apparently aggressive antipathy towards recycling is in equal parts perplexing and appalling.

I am forced to throw beer cans and wine bottles into the trash, and a handful of atoms evaporates from my soul with every clink and clank. And believe me, that adds up to a lot of eschatons. Not to mention glass and aluminum.

Still, let me say a few words in defense of filth. Friends have come back from NYC visits and exclaimed "It's so clean!" They are all liars. That's all. It's not clean. "Clean" is the very last adjective I'd chose to describe Manhattan. But the strata of dirt, gum, spit, urine, grease, vomit, dust, smoke, snot, and other mercifully unidentifiable detritus are the patina that contribute to that ineffable sense of place.

Just consider the dinosaur galleries in the Museum of Natural History. Not only are their public surfaces grimy beyond compare, but the grime itself has been worn in a normal distribution curve. That's an historical record every bit as revelatory (if more ephemeral) as the stairs of a medieval monastery.

Point is, if everything were sterilized every night, what would you have? A safe, enervated tabula rasa. You certainly wouldn't have New York.