Taking Out the Trash on a Day of Rest

 Today was one of those days when I felt the oppression of living in the summer heat here in Arizona. It was Sunday, and I was restless. But there was no way to go for a walk of any length. In the afternoon I went outside, breaking my Sunday day of rest to take out the trash early. They would have collected it via the trash service at our day four hours later. I justified breaking the day of rest to do a physical chore on the grounds that someone else would have to do it later. 

It was a heavy bag. As I walked down the outdoor hallway to the stairs, I felt the stirring of the air. It had that feeling of a furnace blast. Later I would learn that the temperature had peaked at 114. So we had the "eleven handle" on the temperature at last, a little later than usual this time of year.

That explains how, while using the fan this morning while reading on the porch, the electric fan had felt like it was blowing a bar-b-cue grill fire in my face. 

I took the bag down to the dumpsters which are in a small concrete pen the walls of which are as high as the dumpsters. There are two dumpsters, one for recycling and one for normal trash. Without thinking, I slung the heavy trash bag into the dumpster for recycling, and only realized my mistake a few seconds later. I'm more used to using that one, heaving the box of empty San Pelegrino bottles we get from Costco. Mineral water is very tasty in the summer, but I try to drink normal tap water with ice as much as possible.

In this case, my muscle reflex took over to sling the trash bag into the recycling. I looked at it in the dumpster. There was already a bunch of crap in there. I am not above climbing into the dumpster to retrieve something I have thrown in their by mistake, or immediately regretted it. But I past the point where I could do that without a step ladder of some kind. I would have to do that in the blazing sun of 114 degrees. Nope. I will have to let the trash bag stay in the recycling. Rationally I know that recycling is mostly bullshit anyway, and other people do this all the time, people being people.Nevertheless there is a desire in me to play by the rules as much as possible, whenever I can, so that if I need the grace to bend them or break them, I will be aided by cosmic fate when I do so, having not squandered it on idiocy.

Moral of the story is to have waited for the trash butler in the evening. That is their job. It is I who have the rule about the day of rest and should have obeyed it. But the truth is that I just couldn't stand the heavy trash container anymore and wanted it out of the house, but I was impatient to wait until evening. Maybe I wanted an excuse to go out in the heat and stretch my legs. That's why it takes self discipline for rules like no physical chores on the day that celebrates "the Eighth Day of Creation."