(and how to use it: Line Sweeps are here!)
Everyone needs their own mooper scooper. Here’s how to make one in four easy steps!
1. Find a water jug (one- or two-gallon will do nicely)
2. Locate your knife
3. Cut hole in jug
4. Fill with tiny pieces of trash (pictured is one day’s spoils).
…So you wanna be hardcore? Try doing line sweeps for two weeks, kid. I’ve only made it through two days, and my brain is already fried.
DPW Cleanup Crew is getting grungier and grungier, and every day things seem just a little more absurd. People’s work clothes are slowly turning into bizarre costumes, and attitudes get brasher and surlier as we all inch our way toward mass insanity.
I still can’t think of many places I’d rather be. It’s rare to find a place where your work is this meaningful, where you’re surrounded by friends and allowed to express yourself completely… and that’s what keeps us here, the last dregs of the cleanup crew .
Most of us took Monday and Tuesday off. Two days off! In a row! We really didn’t know what to do with ourselves… but we figured it out. For two days, we lazed around at the hot springs and day-tripped all over the state of Nevada.
Then, Wednesday morning, we gathered our moop buckets and tweezers and pliers and vise grips, and assembled at 2:00 and Esplanade. Mel explained the line sweep technique:
1. Line up six feet apart at the beginning of each city block.
2. Walk in a straight line, picking up every tiny piece of moop you see.
3. Try not to miss anything, or we’ll have to go back and re-do that area.
And that’s what we do now, from 9:00 to 5:00. It’s maddening, and habit-forming. After spending a few hours looking at the ground, it’s hard to remember to look up. What if you miss something? Mel tells me that she finds herself back in San Francisco, wanting to pick cigarette butts out of the gutters.
In the meantime, our brains are totally fried from staring at playa all day long. Thank goodness we’re among friends: everyone here has a sense of humor, and we keep ourselves laughing all day. Mel, Snatch, Kimball, and Miss Handler give us daily “morale breaks”, and Katy Bell helps us avoid back pain by reminding us to stretch…
Yeah, it ain’t so bad.
