Chapter 5, The Great Drained Bockel, September 26th, 2006
In purgatory, there probably aren't any garbage disposals.
People there will have to scrape all food remains into the trash,
And if so much as an onion bit gets into the drain, it will have to be carefully fished
out before the water is turned on, lest the drain clog. And also it will be as in many
cities on the east and west coasts. The garbage will have to be separated into plastic, glass
cans and food muck. So there will be no peace after dinner. No shoving all leftovers down
The Theory of Money and Credit
when sewage systems became more common.
Nowadays, the Euro people commonly toss their trash
into their own yards and try to cover up
for this primitive reality by calling it composting.
If you were a New Yorker before 1997,
you were guilty of a crime if you used a garbage disposal.
But the state finally relented
and granted the freedom to grind.
When my last garbage disposal wore out,
The search for a replacement was a joy. You can get a normal household disposal with half
horsepower, or you can step it up with a three-quarter horsepower engine, or you could
dare to step into the future with extreme disposals with one-horsepower engines, capable
of grinding up a whole pineapple or a sack of potatoes or a set of glass tumblers you
were tired of.
And so, of course, there was no choice for me. With my new unit there was nothing that
wouldn't go down. That crab-leg dinner left piles and piles of orange crustaceans on plates,
but in they went. Thanksgiving turkey remains, in goes the corpse. My double batch of muffins
overcooked, but no problem, down the grinding machine go twenty-four muffins, chickens,
workshop bones and even the much dreaded banana peel. It all works so well. Where's the downside?
I couldn't see any. The next step, of course, is grease. Everyone knows or, so we are told,
never ever put grease down the drain. But, hey, this is the modern age. Why take household
appliance advice from people who are still living in the fifties? So it started with
with Bacon Grease, Zoom. Then I pushed the envelope further and further. In the most
outrageous act of disposal extremism ever, I dumped a full gallon of hot grease straight
into the sink, and watched with pride as it slid lazily and effortlessly down. Again,
where's the downside? For a time it seemed that I could get away with these sink sins
forever. Then one day I noticed a certain bogginess. The disposal side didn't seem
quite as robust. Water would back up sometimes before flowing out again. Then one day, and
now it seemed inevitable, it stopped. A bit of plunging pushed it right through again,
and I figured that all was well. But then the plunging became more frequent. I must
have slipped into some state of denial as my plunging became weekly, then daily, and
then several times daily. I had to have the plunger very nearby if I was to work in the
kitchen at all. My conscience was telling me the truth. All my abuse of the system was
finally catching up to me. But I ignored that quiet inner voice and figured I could live
of Money.
I lived this way.
I was living an illusion.
My dream of grinding a mountain of trash came to an end.
Finally one day I gave in and called a plumber.
He came and went, announcing that all was well.
Fine, I thought, back to my old ways.
But of course, all was not well.
Then it finally happened this past weekend, a stoppage that would not be broken.
As if to confirm the persistence of natural law, it began following another bacon grease
dump. The water wouldn't move.
I plunged and plunged until my back muscles were sore. Sometimes, if I put the plunger
in the wrong spot, water would splash up and I would taste the muck. That combination of
old garbage with the overriding smell of bacon, a tepid and thick gray-brown oily muck. The
The more it splashed in my face, the more I didn't care. The muck soared high in the air, dropping on countertops far and wide, landing in my hair, soaking my clothes. Sweat mixed with the bacon muck and dripped all over my face. Blisters began to appear on my hands. But the pain was not an issue. I had to beat this clog. No progress.
It was time to break out the chemicals. Liquid plumber gel, baking soda, lye, boiling water, vinegar, anything. Nothing worked.
Should I call a plumber? Heck, I thought, what does a plumber have but the right tools?
So it was off to Wal-Mart to acquire them myself. And I ended up with a dazzling little addition to my do-it-yourself toolkit.
A fifteen-foot drain snake. This would surely do it. I put the snake down, a free passage
for fifteen feet until I reached the end. No blockage. But still the sink did not drain.
Despair set in. I imagined the crews from the city arriving the next day, with city
officials and even the city planner. They would have to dig up my yard with huge tractors
The sidewalks would be ripped up. Specialists would have to be brought in to assess the
damage I had caused. There are probably fifteen different agencies that oversee the water
supply, and they would all be allied against me. I would be sitting there in my kitchen
alone, vulnerable, guilty. And they would be writing citations, wagging their fingers
Another day passed, another day of tepid sink-muck, and then something struck me. The left side
of the Sink Works Fine. Only the garbage disposal side is stuck. But both the garbage disposal
and the other sink flow down the same tube. So how does this make any sense? And I've
already snaked out the garbage disposal. So that can't be it.
Then finally, a revelation. There are two tubes coming from the disposal unit. One goes
I had snaked out the wrong one! But then another problem arose. I could not get the snake down the right one, because the entry point was hidden beneath the choppers on the disposal unit. How will I get in?
At long last I opened the counter door. The pipes were plastic PVC. They all fit together
nicely with large bolts that can be twisted by hand. I twisted the one that led from the
disposal to the main pipe and gently moved it to the side.
And there was the offending glob. It was just sticking there, sort of lifelike. With a fork
I removed it. It was an accumulation of six months of grinding, but tangled up at the
very front of the glob was the most marvelous thing. It was a big piece of green plastic,
something shaped sort of like a washer. It could have been from anything, no one has
ever seen it before. It might have been there for years. It had evidently fallen down the
Sink, managed to slip through the grinding and then rammed into the pipes where it stayed
lodged and began to accumulate muck. It might have been there for many years for all I knew.
Once having removed this, I screwed the pipe back together and voila! Everything worked
perfectly again. Better than ever! Three days of hell were over, after an operation that
That took maybe 90 seconds. Unbelievable.
But here is the real triumph. This little green plastic thing had expiated my sins.
It turned out that none of my supposedly bad habits had done anything to clog my disposal.
In fact, to the extent that some of those bones and grease finally caused a choking,
that was a good thing because it led me to the fundamental source of the problem. I was
Every civic culture in human history has attempted to distort our moral sense.
They want us to believe that right and wrong consist in obeying social and civic priorities.
But there is no moral norm involved in such issues as whether we own disposal units or what we put in them.
Those are merely issues of technology that change with the times.
Our only restriction is not to impose on others, person or property.
Morals do not come from the state and society.
Morality deals with weightier matters that measure our thoughts, words and deeds against universals that are true regardless of time and place.
And in this time, in this place, we can grind our garbage to our heart's content.