Moodswing - Everyone's garbage

I wish I could say I don't normally root through our garbage like a raccoon every week, but the fact is, I like keeping track of it. It's a practice that began when Chris tossed away an entire box of my kitchen stuff when we moved in together without telling me or showing me or hardly looking inside it himself (according to my recollection). Now every time I can't find something, I flail around the house blaming Chris for its disappearance. "My favorite pair of socks with the separated toes! They were in that box of kitchen stuff, weren't they?"

So these days I survey our trash like a total tabloid reporter. "What's this?" I'll shriek at Chris after excavating something that obviously came from my own personal cache of irreplaceable treasures, something I've been cherishing for, like, ever.

"This is my collection of leftover hot-mustard packets from the Chinese takeout, isn't it? How am I supposed to live without this? I love this!"

So the other day, when I looked in the big garbage bin outside, my immediate thought was, "That better not be my cat." Chris is not fond of Lucy, who, I admit, is senile, but all her upper teeth are missing so she doesn't really do that much damage. Even so, I doubt Chris would kill her and dump her in the garbage. Even if she died naturally, he'd most likely leave her where she lay, perhaps outlining her massive black-cat corpse in chalk to better preserve the scene so I wouldn't be able to blame him for what happened. But it wasn't my big black cat in the trash that day, after all.

It was my husband's hair. Lock after long, black, lusty lock, his hair sat at the bottom of the bin like a once-beautiful breathing thing. "What's this?" I shrieked. "Is this your hair? I love your hair!"

And you should have seen Chris! He looked like he'd been prepped for his own execution, with his thick hair buzzed hectically and scars from old bar fights peeking through some of the closer-shaven spots on his scalp. "What the hell happened to you?" I said when I saw his new hairstyle. "Did your head get caught in a helicopter crash or something?" But he just smiled, making him look more sinister because he has big white teeth, too. "Your stylist friend Kidd," he said, "you can blame him for this."

Kidd did this? This haircut was hardly any better than Chris' last, which he got at a barber shop on Metropolitan Avenue that advertised "fades and braids" and doubled in the evening hours as the "Home of the Ten-Dollar Demo CD." But it turns out Kidd did not cut Chris' hair as he was scheduled to do. It turns out that, after I begged my hugely hetero husband to make an appointment at Kidd's salon, which is practically wallpapered floor-to-ceiling with gay porn (for example, I didn't know Ass Master was really a magazine), it turns out Kidd cancelled Chris' appointment twice — twice — and just because Kidd broke his hair-cutting hand, like that's any excuse. After that, Chris got impatient and decided to hack off his own damn hair.

"My husband looks like a serial killer and it's all your fault," I chided Kidd when I saw him yesterday. "You should see what you made him do to himself."

Kidd had just purchased a coffin at Psycho Sisters Homestore, not the fancy coffin but the plain pine-box one, and he'd stopped by with a friend around the corner at Sister Louisa's retro furniture store to bitch about life in general for awhile before heading home. "Fine," he rolled his eyes, "blame me."

The radio was playing pretty loud because the U.S. had begun bombing Afghanistan that morning. The news announcer was summarizing several pro-Taliban reactions since the massacre of Sept. 11 and boiling it down to how these people blame us, basically, for everything.

"Look what you made us do to you," they say about the Sept. 11 massacre. "Look what you make us do to ourselves," they say about the executions of innocent women, the starving of innocent children, the hanging of innocent gay men, the human skinnings and the eviscerations perpetuated by that odious, beetle-eyed scurvy who claim to be holy. "Look what you did," they keep saying as they point to the bottom of the cosmic trash bin where they tossed their own country, and where it now lies like a once-beautiful breathing thing.

Over the sound of the radio I could hear Kidd and his friend argue affectionately over the merits of his new purchase. Kidd said his coffin would make a fine coffee table and that coffins in general make nice home accessories. But his friend evidently disagreed. As they left he pointed to the pine box protruding from the back of his truck. "Can you believe we bought that garbage?" he said.??