Preface To Nine: Up At Four-Thirty

This has been a weird morning. I was awakened by the dogs at around 4:30 am (it's hard to believe it was just an hour ago) because there were folks noisily walking down the street & the dogs needed to report that to me. I got dressed, after being all paranoid about someone trying to break into the house, & went outside to find some of our recycling strewn on the street. (I think I finally got up because I heard a car crushing a can.) I picked it up, then noticed that one of the bins was missing.

A quick word: we pay a commercial company here in Huntington to pick up the recycling. In Austin, it's part of what you get with electricity & trash pick-up. Austin does it weekly. Here, it's biweekly & some folks say (we've not experienced this) that they sometimes forget to come entirely. Also, they don't take glass. Who doesn't recycle glass? Anyway.

I assumed that, since it was a lot of aluminum cans, someone had simply taken the kit & caboodle & drove off. (In Austin, some folks on recycling day would drive up & down the street & take the aluminum out of the bins.) But something compelled me to walk down the street - it's a lovely morning, all of 60 degrees, & an almost-full moon sat in the western sky lighting the area in its gauzy way - & I found the bin on the porch of a house about seven or eight houses down.

This house is a rental & the kids who live there - & they are kids, college kids - I met only once, when our movers were trying to get the semi through our very narrow street - & they were very drunk, asking me questions like, "How old are you? Do you like to drink?" I told them that my wife & I had just moved in & that prompted them to tell me, in their drunken intensity, to NOT SIGN THE PETITION. Apparently the neighbors have been circulating a petition to get them to move - for their loud music & late-night carousing - the boys who live there apparently have a punk rock band, but from what I've heard it sounds more metal - although I of course haven't been living here long enough to see such a thing. I was mainly concerned about the movers getting the trunk out of here. (& interestingly, none of the neighbors I've talked to have seen any petition.)

Anyway, I took the bin back - it was still three-quarters full - I can only assume that it was a stupid drunken impulse on someone's part, or else it could be that the bins are from Austin & say "Austin recycles" on them. Austin is considered a very cool town, of course, in this part of the world. One kid at WMUL even told me, "That's a great city, yeah. Never been there, but I hear it's a great city."

Part of me thinks that I may end up causing a commotion if they come out & find it gone, although they're probably drunk & asleep by now. I'm sober & very, very awake. It's annoying. & I'll probably stay awake until the recycling folks come.

This of course has nothing to do with Self Help Radio, to which you really should be listening & on which I really should be working. The wife is in Pittsburgh, looking at tongues (I couldn't make such things up), so it's just me, the ever-alert pups, & that moon, slowly descending as a very long day begins.