Until You Return to the Ground

Dirty thoughts

Before I moved to LA but when I already knew I had to move to LA, I took a work trip to the Sportsman’s Lodge in Studio City where at one point a bunch of friends and I sat in a hot tub. It was a collection of people who had already moved and people who were about to move and we all agreed that living in LA was like being dead. Everything was easy, bright, and slow, but you missed the feeling of waking every day and fighting for your goddamn life. Plus, everyone on earth (New York City) thinks you’re in a better place and then promptly forgets about you.

With Easter still visible in the rearview mirror and my own birthday currently t-boning me (it’s today, we don’t need to make a big deal), it seems like a perfect moment to contemplate my own mortality. Living is hard but fun, dying is scary but inevitable, and every single one of us kinda has to do both. If you’d like a really visceral metaphor for your own mortality might I suggest…

…composting?

Thanks to the pandemic, in which my free time became even freer, I finally ordered and assembled a compost tumbler from Home Depot. It’s plastic, so all environmental benefits of said composting were negated the moment I began. Already a good metaphor for the futility of life.

When you begin composting, as I assume you’ll do the moment you finish reading this, you will be shocked at how much soft, wet garbage you generate. This will immediately validate your decision to spend money on the plastic.

But after a few weeks, you will open your tumbler to find the slimiest, foulest goop you’ve ever encountered in your entire life. As a bonus, it will be crawling with actual maggots. A lot of them. Those lines from the ancient text—“the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout”—will leap to the front of your mind. You’ll furiously Google lots of articles and find that the maggot proliferation has to do with your “browns to greens” ratio, something that sounds sports-related but is more scrounging-up-a-lot-of-cardboard-and-leaves- related.

You’ll consider giving up on the toxic sludge, offloading this composting con on some Craigslist rube. Let them figure it out.

Then, seemingly overnight, that toxic sludge will transform into rich dirt that smells like life itself. And because you have years of religious education hardwired into your brain, you’ll think that maybe this is what Christ meant with the whole “this is my body, which has been given up for you” thing. Maybe it’s not so crazy that he said we’re eating his actual flesh because…we are. It’s in the dirt, it’s in the trees, it’s in the air, it’s everywhere, just like all the life that’s ever been and gone. Everyone we loved, everyone we lost—turns out they’re still here. They’ve been here this entire time. They just look and feel different because worms ate them.

You’ll stop seeing flies and fleas and even maggots as disgusting nuisances to be eradicated, but as tiny miracles, doing the work of transforming literal garbage into something that can create life itself.

And then you’ll find yourself with a lot of compost, and it will just sit in your driveway and think to yourself “I need to do something with that” even though it doesn’t really matter because you live in LA and you’re already dead.

If you’re looking to affirm a life-affirming organization, consider a donation to The Ron Finley Project.