Danny Katz: Never in 22 years have I felt compelled to write a sequel to a column

Never before in 22 years of writing  have I felt compelled to write a sequel to a column, because my articles are self-contained works of narrative completeness, requiring no further investigation or resolution.

Also no one’s ever shown any interest, so that may come into it, too.

But, a few months back, I wrote an article about my obsessive wheelie-bin diligence, and how I’ve become the neighbourhood “Bin-Colour Reminder Twerp“.

It’s the kind of brave topic I like to tackle, cutting to the heart of the global socio-politico-econimo-rubbisho zeitgeist.

In the article, I expressed the anguish of being used by my neighbours to lead the way with my weekly bin-colour configurations. And how I was seriously considering putting out the wrong-coloured bins, making everyone copy, then creeping out in the middle of the night to swap them around like a devious midnight Binja.

For some reason this article got a big reaction from the elite echelons of Australian society – the Facebook commenters.

Some people liked it, praising me with the eloquent power of language – a laughy-face, a laughy-face-with-a-bead-of-sweat, and the rare and coveted laughy-face-rolling-on-the-floor-with-tears-of-joy, which is the emoji equivalent of a gold Walkley.

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Others hated the piece, saying I was “unneighbourly” and “That was 20 minutes of my life I won’t get back!”, which hurt at first, and then I thought, well, if it took them 20 minutes to read 538 words, maybe these are not the kind of readers I need to be getting too worried about.

And a fair whack of people asked for a follow-up. They wanted to know if I went through with my bin-swapping threat, and some of them even threw in a desperate hands-pleading emoji, so I knew this was a matter of life or death.

Against all my anti-sequel-writing instincts, I’ve decided to reveal what happened next.

Of course, I copped out. My bin diligence is so extreme, so ingrained, that when I tried to to drag the wrong coloured bin out of the driveway, I began to get shakes, palpitations and a crushing pain in the chest.

Possibly because I was trying to squeeze past the car and got wedged between the fence and the driver’s side mirror.

I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I didn’t. Instead, I got my son to do it.

I told him to start taking out the bins from now on – and he has no idea about bin colours or collection days or even that our local council has a waste-management system.

He just dragged out any old bin, at any old time, then dumped it in any old spot – didn’t even measure the mandatory 50-centimetre gap between bins using my patented Stretched-Arm-Length Method ®. Hard to believe we actually share DNA.

The tale ends tragically. Since then, my neighbours have given up on me, stopped trusting me, shunned me completely.

I am no longer the Bin-Colour Reminder Twerp. I am forgotten. Unloved. A has-bin.