I’m on the couch.

I’m on the couch, and the garbage can is on the counter.

I’m on the couch watching television and the garbage can is on the kitchen counter. I can see it out of the corner of my eye.

It’s red. Red like a medical waste bucket.

I can see it, but actually I think I can hear it, too. It makes a noise in my head like a metal table dragged over cement.

It isn’t the first time the garbage is on the counter and it won’t be the last. I remove it over and over and over again, sometimes with a flourish meant to explain (without actually saying) “please keep the fucking garbage can off the counter.”  It never works, because Koalas do not understand human nonverbal communication. And if you confront them directly they storm off muttering and pouting to their room.

And so there is the garbage can, leering at me from the corner of the kitchen as I try to watch Westworld.  

And it’s not the dry garbage either, no. This is the wet garbage. The garbage that sits beneath the sink and into which all the vile, sticky, infected refuse of a typical American suburban life is tossed: coffee grounds and egg shells, sodden paper towels, raw chicken slime and bloody band-aids.

Yes, I can definitely hear it in my head. Flimsy metal legs across concrete, but also…is it talking to me?

I think it is.

I mean, not really. Not in a clinically schizophrenic way. But in the way that irritating goddamn fucking red garbage cans on a kitchen counter sometimes talk in your head when you’ve been couped up too long on quarantine in a house of feral, semi-verbal animals.

I think it has a Jersey accent…

“Yeah…so what are you gonna do about it? You gonna come over here and take me down? You gonna confront your father straight up? No you’re not. You’re just gonna piss and moan about it on your stupid blog…yeah, that’s what I thought: big writer, big INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNER” (it says this part with absurdly articulated emphasis) “can’t do nothing about the garbage can on your kitchen counter. How ‘bout you come over here later and make a sandwich? Little PB and J’ll do ya nicely, right? And you don’t even need a plate. Why you just flop those two slices of white bread right on ‘dis counter like ya dad does. How about that? Then you can sit in the Chewin Chair and have a little snack. Won’t that be nice?”

Long ago we had a renter. My oldest and dearest friend. For a time it was good. But he had no defense for the garbage can on the counter. Every day it ate at him, wore him down, eroded his resistance until he emerged from his room briefly only to shower and go to work…eventually he disappeared all together.

We don’t know what happened to him, but I know the garbage can had something to do with it.

“Ahhhh he was a pussy! I mean, he was the kinda guy that washed his stupid hands before a meal! What a fuckin dink.”

I have more resistance. I come from filth, and into filth I will go. I’ve worked hard to keep some semblance of order, of hygiene, of simple human decency…but I know that deep down, at the level of my dna, one ribbon of the double helix is koala shaped – lazily hugging the other as it polishes off an entire family bag of Aldi potato chips in the chewing chair. It gives me some modicum of tolerance for the fact that I live in something that might be described as a White Trash Hogwarts.

And still,

And still,

And still…the garbage can is on the counter.

“Yeah? What of it? Whattayagonnadoabouti?”

Nothing. There is nothing to do . I can take it down but it will return. Normally I would leave the house at this point, but there’s nowhere to go but the Covid Cloud….

The Covid Cloud…oh the gentle, lovely Covid Cloud…

“Yeah, I got your Covid right here!” (The garbage can is somehow, inexplicably, grabbing its crotch while it says this…)

A koala emerges slowly from beside the refrigerator into my peripheral view (he moves silently), dreamily gets a handful of Saltine Crackers from the cabinet, slides the garbage can across the counter six inches, places the crackers on the counter, and proceeds to eat them one by one – chewing and smacking loudly enough that the Chewin Chair is a moot point.

This quarantine needs to end.