It Was the Strangest Thing...

I was sitting on the couch talking to a friend on the phone, when suddenly water started spewing out of the cupboard above my stove. I mean just pouring. It was falling in sheets onto the hood and from there pooling on the range. Did a pipe break? was my only thought until suddenly the flow started to taper off, and then, drip... drip... it stopped.

Did a big hunk of ice fall through the roof and drain a bunch of snowmelt into the kitchen?

When I got closer, I realized that the stuff wasn't water. It was a little thicker than water. A little yellower... a little oilier. And in fact, it was canola oil. The thick glass bottle had spontaneously fissured horizontally, ALL THE WAY AROUND the middle. The bottle was still standing, looking pretty well in tact, but when I reached for it, the top half lifted right off the bottom. Nothing else was touching it, either - no evidence that anything had fallen on it. I've never seen anything like it in my life.

What does this have to do with the Trash Project? Two things:

1. It wasn't a canola oil bottle. It was a Crown Royal Whiskey bottle that I had filled with canola oil in the bulk section. Suddenly I found myself wondering if this was some sort of strange sign... somebody trying to challenge me on the trash-free thing. This bottle has quite a story behind it. It was a holiday gift from my uncle, mostly for the "ski goggle sack" that it comes in, or so said Uncle Dave... The bottle went to Chile and back with me, unopened. When it finally got consumed, it made a friend of mine really really really really sick. That same friend was on the phone with me when the bottle broke. Spooky...


2. I just increased my trash accumulation volume by like 10,000%. Broken glass is not only useless, but also dangerous, and most cities won't recycle it (because of the hazard to employees).


I should mention that up to this point, I've been carrying my trash accumulation around in the useful "ski goggle sack" that the Crown Royal bottle came in - yet another strange coincidence - and until the broken bottle, I only had 4 tiny things in it, weighing in at just over an ounce all together:

• A little tag that came on a bunch of organic kale. I thought it was paper when I bought it, but when I tore it from the re-usable twist-tie, it turned out to be plastic.
• A rubber hatchet-blade protector that was doing just fine until I forgot to remove it before chopping kindling. The thing split in two, becoming trash by a single hatchet blow.
  
• A foil-lined envelope flap (the rest of the envelope was just paper) from a friend's wedding invitation.
• An itty-bitty piece of plastic that detached itself from a reusable bag.
  

And that's it. I swear. And now the bottle. I guess that thing really wanted to find its way back to the purple sack!

So yeah, despite being bummed about getting pegged with a big bag of trash, and having to clean cups-full of oil off of a variety of kitchen surfaces, I just can't get over how strange the whole thing was.