Trash trucks in the morning make me happy

I’m sitting on my deck, it’s cool and foggy in my Los Feliz valley. The thursday morning trash pick up is underway and it is one of my favorite things. The sound of trash trucks is a sign that civilization continues. It used to be a sound I didn’t like and now I look forward to it. Yes, we as a civilization continue to have trash pick up. One day this will cease to be the case. Maybe some new innovation, we feed trash into a replicator to have it broken down into it’s atomic components. Maybe civilization has fallen apart and what little waste we as humans produce is burned for fuel or just allowed to rot where it falls. Who knows, but for now, natural gas powered trucks roam the streets of Los Angeles, robot arms grab big blue, green and black bins, hoist them in the air and dump their contents into the gaping maw of the truck – like some frat boy emptying a Solo cup.

We’re off to Costa Rica tomorrow for 8 days. I’m excited and also slightly anxious. There’s this part of me that loves travel and dreads the friction. Airports, language barriers, not knowing how things work. I sort of speak Spanish but I’m not fluent. Weirdly I felt none of this when I went to Germany last year and maybe that’s because my German is better than my Spanish? I was watching videos last night about Costa Rica. Fun fact: in 1948 they abolished their army and invested the money in education and infrastructure. Why can’t we have nice things? We don’t actually need a military. Hot take, but we don’t. What war post WW2 have we needed to fight? Can you imagine where we’d be if we’d put those trillions of dollars into improving life? The Soviets were fake and we knew it but used them as a boogyman to give money to arms manufacturers. Not to mention the waste of the wars in the Middle East.

Lots of posts on Instagram about the new Adam Curtis documentary “Shifty.” I quiet enjoyed it but it’s not his best, IMO. I like Hypernormalization and Century of the Self better. This new “no narration” style is also a bit lazy feeling. He’s not for everyone. His documentaries are hard and they’re very disjointed. Wait, weren’t we just talking about banking deregulation in the 90’s? Why is he showing this interview with Ozzy Osborne now? He says it’s like when you’re in a bar talking with your friends how you hop from one subject to another, which is true but you could almost use a disclaimer beforehand so you understand what’s going on with the abrupt shifts in topic. Still though, the sequence about the avant garde hair pageant is pretty great.