Refuse// The Future is Now

I’m back from Cayenne for the moment. I will continue writing as and when I feel like it. 

This happened a few months ago, near Chicago neighbourhood. Chatman is a neighbourhood guy -that’s Ch like shatman.

I’m at the door with Chatman and a guy in a blue striped tshirt. Monday night is bin night (Wednesday night, and Friday night too). Chatman motions me to look at the truck. Woah, new truck! That’s crazy maaaaan! The new truck is a layed-down cylinder , square mouthed,  digesting dustbins’ contents. 

Bin men wear a futuristic fluorescent yellow and green jumpsuit and a facial mask. They work in a team:  two at the back feeding the machine; one at the front driving. The truck makes regular stops and has mechanical arms that lift bins to its mouth once they have been placed in its talons by the waste disposal technicians.

This vehicle’s tour de force was the unusual movement of its abdomen: the cylinder turned upon itself like a smoothed out cement mixer, accompanied by an intense clonking rrrrohhring noise. Sometimes it stopped spinning. Sometimes it span when stationary, sometimes whilst moving. 

We sit there watching as this machine passes by. Chatman proposes a possible configuration of the cylinder’s interior functions. The machine seems most likely to chew things up inside; to compress things. 

Is this the first time you saw it? I ask Chatman

Yeah.

That shit’s crazy.

The future is now!

Toddler-type wonder ends as we talk and regain our adult, unimpressed fronts.
After that I went inside. 

When you try and imagine the future, there are many things we might have, like complete and extensive demographic records or total, inescapable mobile phone network coverage. The future colonises our lives with machines you never thought of.