the joy of corruption

This is the real thing - true corruption. It's what will happen to all of us. And I love it.


That's enough stringing along of the gag. I'm actually talking about compost. No banking, media or racial strife, just me putting all my food scraps into a pair of tubs filled with earth that I have on my father's balcony.

I've always loved how food scraps in soil disappear. I actually had a better arrangement in another place I lived. That soil was so thick with worms that there'd often be more worms than earth. It was nuts. It was so idiotically fecund that everything grew in it. This current compost isn't there yet. I should say, I've never had the space to actually grow anything. There was that time I was a teenager and we had an orchard, but that's another story.

In the meantime I just make earth. After starting with the most crap 'potting mix' imaginable, comprised mostly of woodchips, I'm now starting to get soil worth having. One day I may grow something in it. But at the moment I don't care. I just like collecting all our food scraps, putting them in the soil and watching it rot. In about a month or so, whatever I bury in the soil (eggshells, banana tops and those stupid stickers they put on fruit aside) has disappeared.

If nothing else, I've reduced our garbage to a fraction of what it was. It used to break my heart carrying out bags of perfectly good compost uselessly rotting in plastic. And the flip side of this is weird. Bucket after bucket of food goes into my compost tubs but the volume of soil never changes. The tubs never get any fuller. Spooky.

This is actually a big subject and I may revisit it later. But for now I'll keep it simple. And what's simpler than my hands plunged into the rich soil and my nostrils filled with the smell of corruption? I'm a simple soul and this makes me happy. Human metaphors aside, corruption equals life.