Absurdity, Documented
In a conversation with my big boss a while back, the subject of absurdity came up. Any place is crazy, but many would say Turkey is crazier than most. It’s just such an interesting country.
Have you ever had the situation when people ask how something’s going, and you say “really busy, doing lots of stuff right now,” and then when you try to produce details you can’t, you just know you were busy?
It struck me that I can say “things are crazy here,” and I could know that to be true, but in a year could I really speak for what about it was crazy, specifically?
So I’m going to do what I can to remember crazy things and write them down before I lose them and they go into one big generic mental box.
Local elections are coming up here, which from my understanding pretty much bubbles upward until the more important posts are decided. Anyway, the ruling party AKP, not our favorite, is getting a little more pressure than normal this year.
Concurrently, the AKP-controlled municipality just constructed a kind of containment housing for one of those really big urban steel trash bin things, kind of like a small dumpster, down the street from our building.
They planted these sad little one-stalk shrubs in a planter that goes around the top of the bin on all but one side (the side used to dump the thing out) and hung signs on the bin that talk about protecting the environment.
Well, the poor little bushes are already looking a little beaten down just from the bustle of a busy trashcan, but the funny thing is that the locals are feeling bad about the little guys. These trashcans are normally brim-full just about all the time (nothing is ever over-sized in Turkey except restaurants), and it’s quite normal to see trash bags and furniture and whatnot piled up high above the rim of the bin.
Taking pity on the poor plants, instead of piling the trash high they’re just throwing the bags and loose garbage onto the street, spilling out everywhere and stinking to high heaven. It’s not too uncommon now to see the Turkish “we care about the environment” sign with garbage piled up to the bottom of the sign.