One Man’s Trash

A brief history of trash
When you crush a juice carton or crumple a parking ticket, you’re effecting what might be called a “radical dimension collapse.” You’re changing that juice carton from a volume into a plane; that two-dimensional parking ticket is trying to become a point, which is to say, no dimension at all.

Put these collapses together, randomize them or expose them to entropy, and, voila!, you have a pile of what we call garbage. Add coffee grounds (randomized particulates) and ketchup (a voluminous goo now converted into a plane of surface slime) and you really have garbage.

In school, there’s that test where they show you a regular sheet of paper on a desk, with a crumpled sheet of the same paper beside it. The teacher asks, “Which of these pieces of paper occupies less space?” If you’re a smarty-pants, you say, “They both occupy the same space.” But if you’re really aiming to be a mathematical Buddha, you select the crumpled piece. It may appear “bigger” but the attempt to reduce dimensions renders it ontologically smaller. There is a difference between abstract space and day-to-day volumes—the former is a realm, and the latter is a thing.

The gum wrapper is dead—long live the gum wrapper!
Properly designed litter is by far the most cost-effective form of advertising. A squished coffee cup that always displays at least one complete logo is a success. Products are ludicrously overpackaged not to keep them fresh, but so that in death, litter may live on to pimp for future generations of litter.

Trash 101
A few years ago, I helped plan the future presented in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. As streets were involved, so, inevitably, was trash. After an afternoon researching public trashcans, I learned three simple rules of public trash: 1) There will always be chicken bones in the trash. 2) There will always be one shoe—never two—in the trash. 3) Every other public trashcan will contain a piece of soiled underwear, be it Huggies, Y-fronts, or panties.

From Paris to Baton Rouge
A year ago in Paris, in a local Monoprix supermarket, I saw that, with the exception of Kellogg’s cereal and Carr’s Water Biscuits, everything for sale was from and of France. The French may be crabby, but they sure know how to remain French. I remember reading how Margaret Atwood, after hearing someone belittle Quebec’s laws to maintain cultural distinction, said, “Taken a look at Louisiana lately?” To judge by the humble items we eat and then trash every day, Canada isn’t yet Louisiana, but then it’s also far from being France.

A cultural “Where’s Waldo?”
Next summer, I’ll be publishing
another illustrated book about Canada that will include some pages on trash. The litmus test I’ve been using to select trash is that, at the very least, it should be unfamiliar to Americans. Gravol? Oh, that’s like Dramamine in the States. Aylmer’s creamed corn? A Canadian mainstay. Wagon Wheels? A measured Canadian response to the U.S. Ding Dong.

The one exception is Kraft dinner—the subtle in-joke being the odd emotional stranglehold this product has over the Canadian imagination. On the other hand, maybe the items I end up including will merely remind Americans that there are still a few Canadian products to be sucked into the globalized, U.S.-branded economy.

Trash, suitable for framing
As globalization eats its way through all aspects of all cultures, the hunt for authenticity begins circling in on ever-tinier, ever-older, and ever-more esoteric fragments of the past. What we see here as trash might, in a hundred years, be something placed proudly on the walls of design cognoscenti. You say, “No way!” but anybody who’s ever been near a flea market knows that anything from the Nineteenth Century—anything—is valuable. You merely have to start thinking of right now as something other than right now—as the past—and suddenly it begins making sense.

Four-dimensional garbage truck
What we consider trash and what we don’t consider trash reveals much about us as individuals and as members of our culture. Can we define a nation solely by what it discards? Of course not. Unless, that is, we introduce the fourth dimension, time. Time is something that we can use as a tool as surely as we use our hands as tools to crush paper. If we look at the way we have been using our time, it reveals that we haven’t been very effective at keeping Canadian things Canadian. If you took a great big blob of time from the 1950s and violently squished it, it would yield a vast heap of three-dimensional Canadian objects. If we took a blob of time from 2003 and squished it just as violently, the resulting heap of Canadiana would be small indeed. Waste not, want not. Baton Rouge lurks around every corner.