Once again, it’s garbage night on my street. Garbage night! Hurray! By the sound of it, you’d assume it’s a holiday with a bonfire of some sort, like maybe a Wiccan fertility rite or, assuming we’re all in Latvia, Walpurgisnacht (after the 8th-century Saint Walpurga, though it’s hard to believe her mama named her that).

But tonight isn’t a holiday, alas. There are no pagans rubbing themselves with oil outside my window. And once again, I’m shocked by both the swiftness of garbage night’s arrival and the bafflement of my own response: As in: It’s Monday again?! Already? No way, mister! Why, surely it was just yesterday that I dragged my cracked blue recycling bin and stinky gray garbage can to the curb.

But alas, no one kids. The gods of urban garbage collection have whizzed through the week so quickly that I barely registered its passing. This has been happening to me more and more, this loss of whole weeks. Why, two days ago I failed to file a time sheet at work, because my memory of already filing one was fresh as a daisy. Yup. It only took two editors to observe and explain otherwise; apparently my memory was so stale it had begun to grow mold, although they didn’t put it that way, and no one mentioned the horrifying slab of antique pizza that I once found in my refrigerator.

Speaking of things in my kitchen, I’ve also noticed that time has been racing along at my sink with celerity, and doesn’t that sound like a vegetable? I am not going to post a photo of this phenomenon, but tonight, as is often the case, I stood there wondering what exactly happened to create this towering stack of dishes. Surely my kids and I didn’t actually eat on all of them. Something, maybe an evil overlord, must have reached into the past and transported yesterday’s grubby china into the present. That, or the clock itself is obviously up to some mischief, something beyond the mass hypnosis that led us all to set our clocks ahead one hour despite the fact that everyone agrees it’s a really dumbass idea. And the older I get, the dumbassier it seems.

I stood at the sink long enough to ask these and/or similar things of myself, but not too long, because I was holding my breath from fear of exhaling and causing my towering pillar of crockery to topple and crush me. Also, had I stood there any longer, I might actually have unloaded the clean dishes from the dishwasher and re-loaded it with dirty ones.

Instead, I walked away. I had take out the garbage, after all.