Sunday, January 13, 2008

This Week's Euphemism

**transfer station**

We no longer have a dump in my town. We have a transfer station.

I was hanging out there yesterday and today, procuring signatures so I can run on the Rhode Island Democratic primary ballot as an Uncommitted Delegate. I had a very good weekend: I got 150 signatures, the exact number I need. Only some of the folks who signed:

a) may not live in our town
b) don't know their own correct street address
c) don't know whether they're still registered in town or not
d) are too embarrassed to admit they aren't registered to vote

So I still need to collect another 35 or so to be safe. I have until Friday. The only downsides: a couple of random arguments with Bush-deadenders who wouldn't sign, and one Republican lady's German Shepherd (with a head so massive, it could have passed for Secretariat in a dark alley) bit my right pinkie, the bastard.

I miss calling it the dump. "Transfer station" sounds so hygienic. Anyone who has been to this particular one knows it is anything but hygienic. Sure, there may be environmentally nice things being transferred around, like glass and metal and plastics. But there are also plain old trash, garbage, filth, germs, viruses, vermin, stenches. Just ask the seagulls.

So I was doing a lot of hand-shaking in perhaps the dirtiest place in Rhode Island, this side of The Foxy Lady (famous Providence strip club, for non-New Englanders). Only one person called me on it, though. Late in the day a woman shook my hand, then squirmed a little bit and told me I should be using sanitary hand wipes.

I told her I figured she had just handled trash, I had been shaking the hands of trash handlers all day, so we were probably even.

But she countered with this: she hadn't handled trash, really: she had only dropped off her rinsed-out recycleable bottles and cans, and her neatly OCD-bundled newspapers. No trash on her pristine Independent mitts.

So I had to admit she had me. At least she signed my petition. But she kept looking at her hand like I gave her leprosy.

C'mon lady. It's a transfer station, for gosh sakes.

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