I’m not going to lie, I’m old enough that I sincerely do look forward to a Friday night grocery shopping trip at Wegman’s. But these days in quarantine life, the weekly grocery store really is the only thing going. I can totally understand why all these online group hangout games are popping off, because what fun stories am I going to report back new-wise on the O’Chapin front? “This week, we went to Aldi. Joe purchased some knockoff DingDongs. They were simply called “Cupcakes.’”
In that vein, let me tell you about going to the Fairfax dump. Or as it’s properly referred to the Fairfax I-66 Transfer Station.
I already told you about one of my ill-fated design choices, and I ended up having to dispose of another — I couldn’t even give my jute rug away! I originally got it from a lady on Craiglist, and it’s always funny when you pull up to a house that turns out to be a mansion to come collect their refuse. Although it had the overall look of burlap, the rug served me well before it began to disintegrate.
The owners of our house left a lot of their old paint cans behind, and I’ve been wanting to throw it away for a year and we finally got it done. But if I knew how cool the dump er transfer station was, I would’ve done it sooner.
The whole experience was very orderly: you drive up and tell a worker what you have to throw away and he or she tells you what line to get in. We joked that the guy would see our old Subaru and say, “Sir, we’re not accepting cars at this time.”
That didn’t happen, but we did get confused going through the lines and went through twice the guy in charge of the whole operation was like, "I thought you had some more crap back there in the backseat.” But he said it in a much nicer way.
I was kind of heartened by the fact that we put so much thought into sorting all this stuff. Paint goes here, batteries go here, scrap metal over there. I remember when I went to the dump as a kid at my grandparents house in Upstate NY and you seemed to just hurl everything into a ditch.
There was an entire pile of lawn mowers! And another one of bicycles! With a bicycle-shaped statue to boot.
We sorted our hazardous household material and then drove up to this spot where you take your trash and hurl it down into a dumpster below. There’s no way people don’t get hurt doing this. As we drove up, some bros threw a round glass top to a table and it shattered in the most spectacular way. And that’s what passes for entertainment these days.
