Trash Patrol!

Today I decided to exhibit my rarely-seen civic spirit in the form of helping to clean up Belltown. It's the first time I've ever done this. Yeah, it's taken 19 whole years for me to attempt to beautify my ugly, ugly neighborhood. It all started at the Mars Hill Church on Western & Battery. Before becoming a church, it was a club that the cops shut down because of frequent idiotic gunplay. And before that, it was a depressingly anonymous office building. I got assigned to a group that was working in the immediate vicinity, they handed out gloves and we got to work.

I was initially kind of stoked about eradicating graffiti, but that job fell to the very old and the very young, so I picked up trash. Our territory stretched from Bell to Vine and Western to Alaskan Way (even though that's not Belltown). It soon became apparent that we had drawn one of the less trashy areas, if not the least trashy. We were done in less than two hours - twelve square blocks in less than two hours. We probably would have been done even faster if it hadn't been raining. During the whole operation, I got a chance to chat with my fellow trashers. They were a decent bunch. I'm glad I did this. And I didn't tell anybody about this blog. It just would have confused them.

I left as soon as we were done and headed back up to 2nd & Blanchard. I met another crew there. They were having a really tough time. It turns out that this area was the trashiest and most graffiti-ridden of all. Wow, big surprise there. So those poor souls were pressing on with their grim task and I was free as a bird. Funny thing, it's been about four hours since we wrapped things up. I was just walking around outside and you really can't tell that any garbage was picked up at all. God knows we all tried.

Sorry for the lack of photos, but trash collection around Western Ave. is not what you'd call visually arresting. Instead, here is a shot from the Walking with Dinosaurs show I went to last night at Seattle Center:

Those are two diplodocuses (diplodocae??) walking around. They were quite huge. It was a great show.