A Garbageman Unbothered – Jasper Jordan-Lang

September 24, 2025

The garbageman who won forty-eight Million pounds in the lottery and spent it all in eight years, now returns to working as a garbageman unbothered. To burn the candle at both ends is liberating. Someone told me mayflies only live for one day and manage to reproduce in that short time. People usually talk about controlling impulses, corralling them, managing to keep them at the behest of whatever part of your brain you’d describe as the most rational and if I’d bothered to read more psychoanalysis I’d probably be able to tell you exactly which one. It doesn’t matter but the point is we all usually agree it’s a good thing to be in control of the way we respond to animalistic cues. The desire to own something, to eat something, to reproduce another version of yourself. If you have limited access to something, it’s hard to control yourself once that changes and all of a sudden it’s unlimited. The garbageman had an entourage, a collection of swords and a mansion. His entourage deliberately drove their cars into the mansion. Like when rockstars break their guitars on stage, the garbageman destroys his own house and replaces it. The mayfly exists for one day with the sole purpose of reproducing. Prior to becoming a fly, it exists in various forms of larvae, semi-conscious and sexually incontinent. They mayfly wins the lottery becoming itself, a fly. Something that can live and move and breath and fuck. In the short time period that the mayfly exists, which for some of them, is only minutes, they have no need for the part of the brain which mitigates impulse, and in fact they are entirely guided by it until they die, unbothered in the completion of their mission. The garbageman sits in the hot tub with his entourage, smoking cigars. On speed dial he orders strippers, whilst walking inside he smashes a window with a cricket bat that’s only ever been used to do as such. There is no extenuation of instinct, the most basic impulses and taboos are followed through until they are actually made manifest, which for most people is completely impossible. For the garbageman, the winner of the lottery, he can do whatever he wants, it’s his money and he’s won it. Same with the mayfly as per its life. The mayfly dies, happy in completing its mission and it didn’t have long enough to worry about anything except for that anyway. The garbageman, his mansion trashed, abandoned by his entourage, his money completely gone, reapplies for his old job through the local city council. Completely unbothered, he returns to work alongside his colleagues whose minds reel with what must’ve happened in order for him to be in the same position he is now, as was then, as was prior to his position wherein he was untouched, untouchable, free from worry. At 6am on a Sunday the garbageman, unbothered, clocks in for his seventh shift that week, knowing he’ll work again tomorrow. He thinks to himself that he wouldn’t change anything even if he was given the chance. Pouring refuse into the back of a truck, the sound loudly ricocheting through the suburban street, his colleagues silently judge him, unasking and watching in disbelief.