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Doing the Right Thing

by Steven Martin Cohen

I have always been ecologically conscious of the earth, and my individual impact upon it, in spite of my innermost belief that the earth deserves everything it gets. It's just another goddamn planet, and a noisy one at that. But the earth is not without its positive attributes. And one of those attributes is calcium carbonate, and the effect that water has on this interesting remnant of countless dead organisms who had not the decency or wherewithal to dispose of themselves properly. And so we have caves.

I have been using electric systems* ever since an old girlfriend of mine ripped the carbide lamp from my head and stuck a Justrite** in its place. These things require four D cells. Being in the toy business, and finding myself naturally surrounded by hundreds of these batteries, it seemed a painless transition for me to make, and even cheaper than carbide. Together with Maglights and the Easter Seal*** lights requiring AA batteries, which I was also surrounded by, I was never without too few sources of electrically generated photons to guide me in the darkness of the caves I frequent. And after enough years of this, I found myself with several heavy bags of exhausted alkaline batteries.

At the time I lived in Hoboken, New Jersey. Wanting to do the right thing, I called the sanitation department and told the human on the phone that I had twenty-four pounds of dead alkaline batteries. "What should I do with them?" Confessing to me that nobody had ever called with such a problem, he took my number and told me he would find out what the correct disposal procedure should be, and that he would then get back to me. Ha!!! I thought. It's just the old run around. But to my surprise, a half hour later I got a call, and this gentleman told me to put the batteries in a bag and place them out by the trash, and that the trash pick up persons would be expecting this unusual parcel of goodies.

Wow, I thought. Here I was being all cynical, thinking I knew they weren't going to have the faintest idea how to dispose of an alkaline battery, and to my humbling astonishment, they did, in fact, have a procedure. I was almost about to call all my friends and tell the world of this fantastic discovery I had made, and worse, my model of reality was about to shatter into little pieces.

I stay up late at night. I stay up so late, that I always hear the noisy engine approach as the trash from the neighborhood is collected by screaming tattooed men who fling the cans in the middle of the sidewalk after they have emptied their contents into the big wheeled metal receptacle with all the hydraulic moving parts. Remembering what I had left out there on the sidewalk that afternoon, I decided to peek out the window and see exactly what this special procedure was that they had devised to dispose of alkaline batteries. As I had first suspected, the bag with the twenty-four pounds of batteries was hurled into the back of the truck, right there along with the coffee filters and junk mail. The engine raced, and the big metal scoop shoveled the entire payload into the smelly interior of the machine.

Luckily, my model of reality was strengthened rather than shattered, and, as I said before, it is my innermost belief that the earth gets everything it deserves.

Along with everything else that is deteriorating in the world, it seems to me that I get more junk mail each and every week. I have never actually weighed it, and plotted it on a graph scientifically, but subjectively there seems to be more of it around. Opening all of it is a daily ritual, and is really annoying, and a waste of time. I have to sift through every item, piece by piece, as everyone else does, and separate all the garbage from the more useful bills, electronics and caving publications, and the occasional personal communication that often hides evasively between the pages of all the junk. They inform me about every damn sale in the entire state. They send me catalogs of pots and pans and blenders and imitation jewelry - fluffy stuffed animals - learn to speak a foreign language, secretary boutiques, plant a tree in Israel, foot care, eye care, tooth care, exercise machines I can't possibly live without, hemorrhoid removal services, take out a low interest second mortgage on the house I don't own, insurance companies and affordable above ground mausoleums and free trial offers of this, that, and the other thing, and worst of all -- the endless parade of credit card offers begging me to go into debt with them. They send me every piece of mailable garbage a human being with a positive credit history can get. And I have to throw each and every piece of it out.

Well, I had just received another Stern's catalogue. I throw them out regularly, like the way kidneys remove waste from blood. I noticed the 800 number on the catalogue, so I called them and told them to stop sending me this bullshit. They said they would take my name off the mailing list. Ahhhhh, a small sigh of relief I breathed, short lived as it was, because a few weeks later, I got two Stern's catalogues instead of my usual one. You can't win! And the credit card companies are even worse; not only do they send you advertisements disguised as bills, thus forcing you to open it anyway; their strategy being to deliberately trick you into mistaking the bill for advertisement and throwing it out, thus skipping a payment cycle so they can charge you interest; but when they so politely tell you over the phone that they'll take your name off "the master list", it can't be done in theory, let alone in practice, because the master list keeps re-synthesizing itself from every other list they either bought or sold, so unless you can eradicate your name from everyone else's list simultaneously, it comes back, sooner or later, like some synthetic man-made information virus or cold you keep re-catching over and over again. You can't make them go away, and worse, they arrogantly consider it their freedom of speech to either keep mailing you trash because you have a mailbox, or to have their computers automatically call you because you own a telephone. After all, this is America, and in America we value our freedoms.

But then I got an idea. Actually, Bugs Bunny was the first to state it in exactly these words: Don't get mad. Get even!

I looked down at all that junk mail on my floor, with all those nice return envelopes that say in the upper right hand corner: Postage will be paid if mailed within the United States. Then I looked at all my accumulating alkaline batteries -- all my nice heavy alkaline batteries with no ecologically sound resting place to spend eternity. I smiled the smile of a happy man with a mission, because I instantly knew the ecologically and philosophically correct way to kill all my favorite birds with one mighty stone, and live a longer, healthier, happier life to boot.

I am now in my own recycling business. I mail all my heavy garbage back to the spawning corporate hells from which it originates. It all goes to the same place anyway, so I simply redistribute it a bit, concentrating on those nice credit card companies who will pay by the pound to gas it in senseless circles about the earth which I love so dearly. Debt! I'll show them debt! And when I run out of batteries, I will send those coffee filters on a postage paid ride on a plane or a truck through rain or sleet or snow or hail. I call this freedom of expression -- freedom of speech -- freedom of choice -- Master Charge this week, Visa Card the next! Insurance companies -- Ha! They get me; I get them back. You think I'm crazy, don't you? And here's a nice sweepstakes with a postage paid envelope. Do a little more caving. It's a perfect system that works on so many different levels that Einstein himself must be smiling at me from beyond the grave in his relativistic heavens. I love America, and the earth, and, as I have said before, it is my innermost and sincerest belief that the earth gets everything it deserves.

* There are two systems cavers use for head mounted illumination -- electric systems and carbide. Electric systems usually consist of a bulb-reflector assembly with a battery pack that can either be helmet-mounted or belt- mounted. Carbide illumination was first used by miners and is still used and preferred by some cavers today because of its soothing bright light coupled with the fact that it does not produce the rings and variable illumination pattern produced by an incandescent bulb. In a carbide lamp, water drips from an upper chamber onto rocks of calcium carbide in a lower chamber to produce acetylene gas which exits a nozzel in the center of a reflector.

** A Justrite is a brand of electric caving light where a reflector-bulb assembly mounts on the helmet and a 4 D-cell battery pack clips to the belt.

*** Easter Seal -- another brand of electric caving light

Check out Steve's cartoons series: Screw the Planet