Blog Love Omega Glee: Nationalism In The Scrap Yard (28 April 2012)

Masani pops the trunk on her 2005 Sanpo Sippai, and she and Francine unload the shelves and posts of her disassembled bent metal bookcase, along with a couple broken metal folding chairs, at The Heavy Metal Scrapyard ("Our prices rock!"). An old man wearing flip-flops and a Cleaveland t-shirt wheels a shopping cart full of cans and other metal debris past them, while two younger guys wrestle a bunch of copper pipes out of the back of a pickup truck. There's an open air building with a huge scale behind the parking lot, and behind the building mounds of metal piled up to the horizon. A huge American flag is draped down the side of the building. A middle-aged guy wearing white work gloves comes out of the office behind the scale and tells the old man to put his stuff on the scale. The old man wheels the entire shopping cart onto the scale. The shopping cart says "The Drugstrip" on the handhold bar. "Take the stuff out of the cart. Don't you want the cart back?" asks the guy from the office.

"No, I'll just get another one tomorrow," the old man says, lighting a cigarette.

"Is that cart yours?"

"Yeah."

"OK," the guy goes back in the office and returns with a roll of cash, a few bills of which he gives to the old man, who whistles and walks away.

"Do you think that shopping cart was really his?" Francine whispers to Masani, as the guy from the office summons another scrapyard worker to wheel it away.

"Only in the same way one is mine when I'm using it at the store," Masani says, holding the remains of her bookcase and waiting behind the guys with the pipes.

The copper pipe guys drop their pipes--clang clang clang clang clang clang . . . clang!--onto the scale. "Are those pipes all yours?" the guy from the office asks.

"Yes, sir."

"You didn't steal 'em from no houses, did you?"

"Oh, no, sir."

"OK," the guy looks at the scale reading and peels them off some bills from his roll, which seems to be mostly singles.

"Let's go to the bar," one of the guys says to the other, as they leave.

"OK, ladies, you're up," the scrap guy says, as a couple other scrappers gather up the pipes to carry to the copper corner of the yard.

Francine and Masani put their stuff on the huge scale. "What do you do with all this stuff anyway?" Francine asks the scale guy.

The man looks at the scale, and gives them two dollars, "Oh, mostly send it to Asia where they melt it down and turn it into something else, and then sell it back to us. It used to be easier when we just sent it to the metal shops and steel mills here, but they're gone, so now we have to send it halfway around the world. It doesn't make much sense but that's globalization for you."

Francine and Masani thank him and walk away. Francine says, "I think it's going to be the United States of Earth someday. Globalism is replacing nationalism, and the world's going to be full of things that don't make any sense like stripping our country for scrap just to send it overseas so people working in slave labor conditions can ruin the environments of their countries too just to sell more crap back to us that eventually is all going to end up back here and start the cycle all over again. Eventually we'll run out of places to ruin."

"Well, by that point, we can probably just ruin ourselves all over again. But, hey, cheer up, at least we got two dollars," Masani says, "I thought we were only going to get one. And at least that stuff'll be recycled and didn't go to the landfill."

"I think the whole country's a landfill some days," Francine says, getting back in the car, "Look at all those guys stealing anything they can just to get a couple pathetic bucks for it. And that guy has to know that stuff is stolen."

"He winks at them and they wink at him. Welcome to America in 2012. A gigantic scrapyard where everyone winks at one another," Masani says, starting the car, then turning to Francine and winking at her, "Maybe we do need a global government. There are so many problems like the environment, economy, and crime that cross national borders anymore and no one nation can control."

Francine winks back, "I think that'll just turn the world into a giant junkyard. I don't have much in common with somebody in Utah; how much am I going to have in common with somebody in Uganda?"

"Well, they probably have a scrapyard there too, so that's a start," Masani says, as they drive away.

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel, which is available in print and as an ebook.