Straight From Beezlebub's Armpit

April 14, 2010:

For my next trick, I had to head out to Irvine to shoot some B-roll of a Landfill. Interesting day, with a possibility of aromatic memories to last a lifetime. And who knows, maybe I’d be able to score a slightly-used-to-horrifically-damaged office table.

After I picked up the equipment I would need at Huntington Beach, I hit the road like it owed me money. Sheila, my GPS, lead me straight to the Landfill and I caught up with my contact, John. He was in charge of the place, and would know how to get to the locations I needed to shoot way more than I would be able to manage. We hopped in his truck (he gets his own wheels, a perk of the job) and we drove up to the main staging area.

Okay, so my picture of a Landfill is trash as far as the eye can see, with seagulls trying to eat everything and everyone, and bulldozers suddenly showing up to push it all into a mountain of refuse. And all wrapped up in an odor straight from Beezlebub’s armpit.

Turns out, only the bulldozers were right.

American Landfills, at least the one I was being shown, are pretty organized. Garbage Trucks take the trash from the neighborhoods, towns, or cities to the Landfill. They dump the trash, upon which a bulldozer (or many, in this case) spread it around and pack it down. After all that, those same bulldozers push dirt and compost onto the trash. They do this day in and day out, until there are literally MOUNTAINS of garbage, with each layer actually visible in its progression.

And I was tooling around on said mountain.

I shot everything from bulldozers, to garbage trucks, to the pipes that collected the methane that the mountain of garbage produced. It was all very tidy, and didn’t smell NEARLY as bad as it could have. Of course it was. If it wasn’t Irvine would have them hanged.

After I had got all the shots that I would need, I dropped off the equipment back at Huntington Beach, and headed to Norwalk. Tonight we had a Planning Commission Meeting that we had to tape. We did this with little incident, even though time seemed to stretch forever when they started talking about oh god I don’t even care anymore.

Topics of Conversation @ Norwalk: Comic Con, sleep after coffee, the methane production of Thunderdome, dried fruit, finding Gas Stations, telling people how to not talk without hitting them in the face, etc.

-Nate