On Wet Trash

There are a lot of gross things in this world: mold, cilantro, politicians. There is one thing, however, that grosses me out more than even those things. It lives in your house. It requires your attention. It forces you to deal with it or it will get so much worse. This king of gross things, this emperor of nasty objects, this ruler of refuse is the one, the only, wet trash.

Of course, all trash is at least somewhat gross. That’s part of its nature as trash. Some trash is like a 1 out of 10 on the Gross Scale (GS) though: plastic packaging (1.0 GS), used paper (1.2 GS), broken glass (3.1 GS), that sort of garbage. Do you know what those things have in common? They’re dry. Dry trash is mostly pretty okay! It can get up to around a 5 on the GS for items like dust bunnies (4.8 GS) and hairballs (5.0 GS) which are undoubtedly gross but also pretty easy to deal with.

Once you get above a five though, that’s when the trash starts getting wet. Old coffee grounds (6.0 GS). Moldy old fruit (7.9 GS), leftovers that you forgot to deal with for two weeks because they’re hiding in the back of the fridge like a horror movie character (9.1 GS). Once you mix moisture into the equation, you launch from the middle of the pack all the way to the extremes of the gross scale. The worst thing about this mélange of wet trash is that it gets worse as it sits and settles. It turns previously innocuous trash into disgusting puddles of refuse.

Not only is wet trash immediately disgusting, but it also offers you a dilemma that would make King Solomon pause: do you take out the trash bag that is clearly only a little bit full, or do you hold your nose and try to fill that bag up with more trash over the next few days, hoping the smell doesn’t become so malodorous that it renders your living space uninhabitable?

This brings me to the final curse of wet trash, the thing that haunts my nightmares: when you’re taking out a trash bag that is full of wet waste and that bag decides to shuffle off this mortal coil and breaks at the worst possible time. It is always infuriating when you’re taking out the trash and the bag breaks (you’re doing a good deed after all, why should you be punished for cleaning?!) but when that bag is full of moist mess? Those are the kinds of moments when I question if this life is just an elaborate disguise for hell and if I’m living out an eternity of punishment where I just spend all my time creating and then disposing of wet trash like some sort of moist Sisyphus. That moment when the plastic breaks and all of that goopy grossness plops onto the ground (10.0 GS) seems to last forever. It freezes in time and imprints itself in your memory full of sights, sounds, smells, and visuals.

What about you, can you think of ANYTHING worse than wet garbage?