I am a machine. I do not act from careful consideration, I act from conditioning. I am run the way society has taught me to run. I am run by my habits. I am run by an underlying sentience which has learned to imitate, to fit in, to wear many faces, but has not yet become self-aware.
I am a machine that feeds on many inputs: my childhood, my environment, the society I live in, my education, the interactions I have every day. I feed on many sources, but produce one primary output: waste. I am a waste machine.
I gobble up everything around me — food, mood, products, information, experience — and shit it out. I leave behind a trail of waste: wasted words, wasted time, wasted energy.
I leave behind a trail of trash: plastic wrappers, grocery bags, styrofoam takeout containers, coffee cups, water bottles, band-aids, paper towels, floss, jars, bottles, rotting fruit, wilted vegetables, stale bread, countless boxes, packages and containers.
Even more liberally than I use the world around me, I waste energy. I waste energy with frustration over trivialities — whether I was invited, whether I should do it today or tomorrow, that the cups were put back in the wrong cupboard, that I’m out of clean socks.
I waste time and energy working for someone else’s profit, for a wage I waste on beer, tea, and organic corporate tomatoes.
I waste energy with lust, eyes finding incarnate fantasies in too many bodies. I lust for a life I could be living and forget to live the life that I am alive in.
I waste thoughts, filing intellect into useless bins: opinion, judgment, interpretation, complaint, dissatisfaction.
I expel emotions and energy carelessly and thoughtlessly, like a loudspeaker with no one at the controls, mic passed around aimlessly. Whatever is shouted into the mic, I shout back louder.
I am a machine calibrated for efficiency and immediacy, and waste is the quickest, easiest response. So it has become my default reaction, even to the pettiest concerns.
I am one input in a civilization built on waste. My mechanicalness is incorporated into the mechanism of civilization; my waste is absorbed into the waste network.
Drains take my defecation and urine and liquid food and dirt and phlegm, so I don’t have to see them, think about them or deal with them. Trash cans on every street corner, in every restaurant, and in every house take anything I throw into them. I acknowledge my waste for a moment and then it’s gone and I’m already processing something new for disposal.
A system of screens, billboards, signs, stores, headlines, posters, voices, images, and structures funnel my time and attention, telling me where to look and what to think. My time and attention is processed as waste material. Endless inputs, branded as information, entertainment, guidance, wisdom, news, think for me, or distract me from needing to think at all. I am calibrated to allow these inputs to turn my awareness off and let the machine work, taking in life and producing waste.
As a waste machine, I am a reliable source of income for the industries of modern civilization, which are efficiently arranged to run off the time, attention, labor, money and resources I mechanically spend.
My waste is a necessary resource for the waste cycle of civilization. As a productive waste machine, I am a productive member of society.