Three cheers for Pig Pen Sedaris!
It makes for a charmingly local headline: Area Man Picks Up So Much Roadside Litter, District Council Names Garbage Truck After Him. Except in this case, the Area Man is the famous author and humorist, David Sedaris, whose fame is apparently (and even more charmingly) unknown by the district council and the paper covering the event.
Thrilled to have the vehicle named after him, David ‘Pig Pen’ Sedaris, said: “When I first moved to Horsham district three years ago I was struck by the area’s outstanding natural beauty but I was also struck by all the rubbish that people leave lying around the roads.
“I’m angry at the people who throw these things out their car windows, but I’m just as angry at the people who walk by it every day. I say pick it up yourself. Do it enough and you might one day get a garbage truck named after you. It’s an amazing feeling.”
Don’t know how I missed this story over the summer…a chapter of his next book just wrote itself. The paper followed up with a “holy shit, this dude is famous” piece the next day. (via sedaris’ reddit ama)
Update: I had also missed reading Sedaris’ piece about his Fitbit, in which he talks about his anti-litter efforts.
I’ve been cleaning the roads in my area of Sussex for three years now, but before the Fitbit I did it primarily on my bike, and with my bare hands. That was fairly effective, but I wound up missing a lot. On foot, nothing escapes my attention: a potato-chip bag stuffed into the hollow of a tree, an elderly mitten caught in the embrace of a blackberry bush, a mud-coated matchbook at the bottom of a ditch. Then, there’s all the obvious stuff: the cans and bottles and great greasy sheets of paper that fish-and-chips comes wrapped in. You can tell where my territory ends and the rest of England begins. It’s like going from the rose arbor in Sissinghurst to Fukushima after the tsunami. The difference is staggering.
(via @mmorowitz)
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