West Hollywood, home sweet neurotic home, has joined the string of communities across the nation, conspiring to complicate garbage collection.

This is part of a troubling trend, which is to take menial tasks and then require that real, furrow-the-space-between-eyebrows thinking be applied to them.  Like ordering a cup of coffee.  At one well-known coffee house they’ve got more roasts to choose from than Dean Martin, and “tall” is  small, “venti” is large.  Who the hell knows what “grande” is?

Back in the quaint mists of the mid-20th century, garbage was a simple concept.  It all went into one big container, the organic and the inorganic, tissue paper, motor oil, diapers and stray body parts.  Nobody cared; it all went into the same place.

Taking a simple thing like the garbage and turning it into a matter for contemplation and analysis is an aggression on par with walking out to your car the mini-mall parking lot and finding a handwritten note on your windshield: “Parking Pig – use your own space!”

Weeks in advance of their arrival, the new garbage collection company, contracted by the city of West Hollywood, sent out a bulletin:

“We will be using a fleet of new alternative fuel, automated trucks to speed the pick up of residential refuse.”  (I’m already suspicious.  Since when should I give a hoot whether the garbage truck uses alternative or fossil fuel?)  “Service begins July 1st with new lower rates.  New carts will be delivered to all locations.”

True to their word, new plastic bins with achingly beautiful contours were delivered to our house.  They are stamped with labels in English, Russian, and Spanish, so you can be confused in three languages.  The achingly beautiful bins are color coded: green for yard waste, blue for recyclables, black for ordinary refuse, formerly known as garbage.

Further, the bulletin—printed, appropriately, on recycled paper—explained what garbage could go in what container.  Pretty straightforward until we get to the green garbage bin and the instructions “no palm fronds or yucca” appear.  I don't know about you, but a palm frond or yucca plant looks pretty much like grass clippings in my botanically challenged neck of the woods.  And the prospect of hiring a University of California plant expert each time I have to dispose of garden waste is not a pretty one.

The bylaws for the blue cart for recyclable items make the latest IRS instructions look like child’s play: “place all glass, aluminum, plastic, tin cans, clean dry paper, cardboard, magazines, junk mail, phone books and newspapers in the blue cart, and the emptied bottles and tins cans must be rinsed.  No wet paper!  Number 1 – 7 plastic bags only.  No paper or boxes with wax, plastic or foil coating, string or plastic bags.”  Since when have I paused to determine whether the plastic bag was a number 6 or a number 8, much less revise boxes for wax, plastic or foil coating?  I didn’t know bags had a number.

You’ll be happy to know plastic items marked with the plastic triangle, 1 2 4 5 and NOT the triangles 3 6 7, can be recycled.  I didn’t know plastic bottles came with triangles, either.  Also, ceramic mugs are not recyclable, so that big dopey purple Barney mug you won at the carnival hoop toss can’t be recycled. All of this rigmarole could be avoided by reverting to the primitive, mid-20th century definition of garbage and putting everything in the black bin.  However, when I started to follow this policy and put yesterday’s newspaper in the bin, my wife cried out, “Don’t put it there!  You can save a tree.”  No doubt, if I try to throw out a number 5 plastic bottle, she’ll shriek, “You can save one of Barney’s ancestors.”

If we don't adhere to these strictures we are threatened with being red tagged.  Being red tagged mean your garbage will lie in state, for weeks on end, collecting flies and an unholy stench, and that the night before garbage collection you will stealthily go out into the neighborhood with two bursting full garbage bags in your arms to ensconce in the spacious bin of an unsuspecting neighbor.

Then the following scene will ensue:

NEIGHBOR (holding a hyperventilating toy poodle on a leash): Hello, how are you doing?

ME: Oh, just out for a neighborhood stroll.

NEIGHBOR: I didn’t say what are you doing, I said how’re you doing?

ME: Oh, fine, thank you.

NEIGHBOR: With two jumbo garbage bags in your arms?

ME: Yeah, I’m working on my biceps.

(And then I try to nonchalantly open the container when the neighbor’s back is turned, feeding Fido a biscuit, and I gracefully shove the bags in the bin.)

NEIGHBOR: What did you just do?

ME: (after an unbearable pause) Nothing.

NEIGHBOR: Don’t you nothing me.  I saw you put those two garbage bags in the bin.

ME: What, moi?  Oh, those two hefty bags? . . . Well, it’s garbage and that’s a garbage bin.

NEIGHBOR: But that’s not YOUR garbage bin!  And it’s a green bin—for garden waste only.

ME: I’m sorry, sir.  I didn’t notice.  I’m color blind.

The toy-poodle-walking neighbor whips out his cellphone and places a call to the local sheriff's department.  Soon Deputy Patton came, dispatched from the 7-Eleven parking lot.  It turned out the man walking the toy poodle didn’t even live at that address and they weren’t even his bins!  The deputy got the meddlesome neighbor out of his hair, assuring him I would remove the garbage to another location and immediately be submitted to an Ishihara color blindness test.

“You put up with a lot in West Hollywood,” the deputy said as soon as the poodle yanked his owner out of hearing.  “Some people will call the cops if they hear their neighbor brushing their teeth too loudly.”

As a routine end to the call Deputy Patton asked for my name and birthdate.  After running this data through his computer, he found an outstanding warrant for a jaywalking incident that occurred in Sheboygan, Wisconsin many years ago.

After serious reflection I have concluded that being manacled and carted off was maybe for the best.  Sure, it’s lonely here and from time to time I remember those achingly beautiful garbage bins.  But if I had stayed in West Hollywood, trying to figure out how to throw out my garbage, I would doubtless have been buried alive under the gathering debris, or gotten a free ride to the madhouse, straitjacketed and babbling about palm fronds, yucca, and plastic bag number 7.

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