Trashy parks and feelin’ manly

Sometimes being wasteful just feels sooo good … doesn’t it? Crushing a measly plastic water bottle in your hand. Slamming that gum wrapper on the asphalt. Drinking from Styrofoam cups. It’s just so … dangerous. Living life on the wild side sure has its draws. Until you see your very first landfill or take your first swim in the Pacific with someone else’s old Doritos bag. I saw a landfill with my own eyes for the first time when I was in Israel. There, the state digs these massive craters in the sand, then covers the piles of garbage in more dirt so that when you look out from the highway you see what look like brown Leggos bigger than US air force base hangars.

An old landfill near Tel Aviv, commonly called "Shit Mountain"

As you learn what exactly it is that you are looking at, you start to picture this reality:

Common landfill image, though this one happens to be from the UK

In researching these lovely photos, I came across some info on what exactly is to become of that Tel Aviv landfill, formerly called Hiriya. Apparently, this guy Eli Cohen uses biological organisms to digest trash and turn it into other useful things and guess what … it works. One blog says he has a ton of environmentally friendly sanitation sites in Israel, one being Hiriya. MSNBC, meanwhile, ran a story on Hiriya and a video that features some guy talking about all the changes.

In the next decade or two, that massive Leggo of trash (I promise, from the road it really resembles a big Leggo) will in fact be a national park! Now maybe I don’t want to go rolling around in trash pretending its a park, but I would sure rather look at something that appears to be a park than stare at Shit Mountain. So riddle me this: why is it so hard for other businesses or governments to adopt similar methods for more efficiently getting rid of human waste?

Hot town summer in the city…

or not in the city, anymore. I am officially back in Cali for the summer from D.C. and already have been bombarded with a-holes and their sorry SUVs. Yesterday I was driving to the grocery store and coasting to a red light no more than 500 ft ahead, waiting for it to turn green. All of a sudden a sad sack in his Mercedes honks at me and swerves around me to speed up only to slam on his breaks at the red light. I roll up next to him and see the 2 year old sitting in back and the blue disabled card hanging from his rear view mirror. Seriously man? Was that necessary? We then proceeded to sit at every red light together down Irvine Blvd.

More gripes about my first few days here:

tourists in Newport Beach that dont stop for pedestrians or cyclists

beach goers that litter

drivers on the freeway who think its acceptable to toss lit cigarette butts out their windows

Costco shoppers that go through pallets of single-use, single-serving water bottles

massive intersections that are dangerous to cross as a pedestrian

traffic lights that cater to drivers instead of pedestrians

Ugh, the list goes on.

In fact, let’s make this interactive: post your own personal related gripes as you please. It kinda makes you feel better, I promise!