The Brainhole

Look. I try to be conscientious about environmental issues. We recycle at home. If the option’s available wherever I’m eating, I’m not the type to ignore the “bottles & cans” bin and shove everything in the trash heap. I can admit to adopting LED-light as my primary source of post meridiem illumination begrudgingly, but I did it (“It’ll outlast you” is not nearly as much of a selling point for a lightbulb as people seem to believe it is). Despite wanting to undermine their unnatural lifespans in secret, I switch off said LED lights when I’m leaving a room, even if just for a minute. I walk or use the subway 9 times out of 10 when I have to get somewhere. I shop and eat organic.

In a quotidian context/living in New York City, there isn’t much else for an individual to do, I don’t think. All told I’d say my credentials are pretty good. So I think the motherfucker who thought it was in his rights to tell me to “Pick that up, asshole!” when I took a shot at a trash can (at 1AM on a newly-minted Monday) with some balled-up wax paper (which had only minutes prior enveloped a falafel sandwich) and missed was being more than a little presumptuous. Sure, he’d read me correctly as far as my intentions at that moment were concerned - the paper had scuttled to a stop near the base of the trash and nestled into some viscous goop the likes of which you see on every street corner in Manhattan no matter the weather, and I had zero intention of retrieving it. Had he been an elderly lady, I might have felt worse about this fact. But he was a young, Anglo-Saxon male…so this ruffled me a bit.

Again, I’ll be the first to tell you his intentions were good and littering isn’t cool. Sadly for him, the environment, and myself, in a battle between what’s good for Planet Earth and my OCD, my OCD will win without fail or contest. I was already having problems given that some tahini had spilled over the side of the falafel (back when I was working on that) onto my fingers and I’d had to adjust the pita with my bare hands. I realize this isn’t a defense, but I have this acute, peculiar inability to function after I’ve eaten until I’ve washed my hands of even the rumor of comestible sediment. So the dusty, ashen grain that comes off a pita that’s been toasted over an open flame is more than enough to set the notion in my mind that I’ve got to rid myself of this wax paper quick as I can and find myself a sink. That’s where I was at.

But this is my real point. Getting yelled at (or even lectured) by white people about environmentalism is a cognitively unique experience for a minority. To explain:

Imagine you’re in your living room surrounded by your friends and close relations, when all of a sudden a white man bursts through your front door. You’re alarmed. It’s unexpected. You’re unsure what he’s about to do next. To your unbelieving horror, he stands on your coffee table, coolly surveys the scene, drops his pants, and takes a huge, steaming shit. Right there in your house. A shit of such supernatural darkness it seems to make everything in its vicinity shittier by proxy. He doesn’t wipe. He just pulls his pants back up, zips, smiles, and then turns around. While his back faces you and the rest of the room, you look to your friends, eyes wide with alarm - if not for an explanation, at least some semblance of recognition that what has just happened in your home was neither natural or warranted.

A minute transpires in total silence.

You’ve just about collected yourself and the stern reply you want to present to this stranger is on the tip of your tongue when he turns around to face you again. You lean further back in your chair awaiting you’re not sure what - an errant spray of piss, some other inconceivable affront to an interior decorating scheme you’ve been working on for awhile - when he clears his throat and says,

“Hey guys, don’t you think it’d be a good idea to clean this up?”

—-

It’s hard, milling about at a fracking protest, counting the number of iPhones being brandished by the protesters that have been wrapped in defensive plastic armor, to think of a way to escape this insane context we find ourselves in today short of suicide or nervous collapse.

I don’t know. I’m trying to find the uplifting, hopeful message here and I’m coming up short. I think it’s something like: Hang in there. The falafel might be better tomorrow when you haven’t been drinking and it’s a little warmer out. And forgive the obsessive compulsive, for they know exactly what they do and feel awful about it. Sorry guy.