Why trash is always full

I forget which comedian it was who made the observation that the last thing we do before leaving on vacation is to empty the garbage. It is also the first thing we do when we get home. This also seems to be the case at the end of each day and again the next morning.Our civilization has gone mad with packaging. When you buy a $1 burger it comes wrapped in paper, stuffed in a bag with one or two napkins. If I could only eat the packaging! (The ice cream cone is one case where this actually happens). Batteries are plasticized in one of those clamshell packages that is dangerous to open. I have lacerated myself countless times trying to find the trick to these. After you get the batteries out, you try to stuff that awkward clamshell, now distorted and blood stained, into the trash where it promptly jams crossways, creating a little ramp that redirects the coffee grounds to the adjacent floor.We all use those little plastic baggies to save leftover food for a couple of days before we throw it away. We don’t throw leftovers out immediately as that would be wasteful. We have to wait until they go bad. This seems reasonable until you realize that the food came in packaging, and now it is going out in more packaging.Now I know what you are thinking. Just empty the garbage more often. Well it doesn’t work. For a long time I was puzzled by this until I started watching the History Channel. Here is where I learned how to explain all those things that seem to have no explanation. That’s right, it’s the aliens. Late at night when I am sleeping they park their spaceships over my house using that Romulan cloaking device thing to avoid detection that we learned about on “Star Trek.” This also explains why that late movie didn’t record off my dish, which has an unobstructed view of the western sky. They then transport (see “Star Trek” previous) into our kitchens. (The dog barks in the middle of the night for a reason). You see the aliens kind of have a similar problem. They only have so much room on board for trash before they have to find another place for it. Being an advanced civilization, they have figured out a way to transmogrify their garbage so it looks like our garbage. Or have they? Could it be that they have learned to survive using our resources in an unaltered state? Is this the reason we are running out of critical resources?Aha! So this is why the stores never have my 36 by 32 pants!Bill Abrams resides in, and empties his garbage from, Pine Plains.

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