Buzz Blog

Ah, July. As we enter this month you can smell that sweet smell of summertime in the air. ...No, wait. (sniff, sniff). Oh! (cough, cough) Yeah, that's not summer, that smells like rotting eggs and sulfur with a hint of bad coffee. Sorry to the city of Salt Lake, but this year a lot of the streets look and smell like garbage. And not your standard pile of shredded documents with empty yogurt cups garbage. I mean the multiple bad Thai food meals stacked high until theres a puddle of brown water at the bottom of the can kind of garbage. Our city wreaks!

--- Now before you start blaming it entirely on the bad air quality, no, you don't get that trump card. Yesterday I heard a 16 year old say (with full confidence in his voice) that his acne was so bad because of the air quality. To which I replied... “You're sixteen, it's not the air.” While it does contribute to that fact that it lets very little escape, it doesn't contribute to what caused the pollution in the first place. Outside of that little section where downtown paid to have golf carts come around and clean things up year round, everything else is just foul. Take for example, the Trax stations. Being a train rider myself, it's not all that fun to stand at a station that's been used as a public restroom twenty times over by random people that week. When the homeless walk away and say it smells awful, that's a big red flag that the place needs a little cleaning. With all due respect UTA, you raise our rates every year for no good reason despite having government money to keep the service running (which is another rant in on itself). If you're going to charge me $2 to ride 5 blocks, the least you could do is take a fire-hose to your stations every night.

And public works are not just to blame, a lot of the local businesses downtown don't do anything else. Take for example... Port O'Call. How much blood and urine and vomit is on that southern sidewalk and parking lot? How much do you think gets cleaned off nightly? They got one cleanup crew that I know of, and it's name is rain. And don't think I'm just picking on the Port, there's a lot of bars like that who don't care what happens outside the club as long as it's not inside the club. And I don't contribute much of that to people being outlandishly drunk, I chalk that up to stupidity. If you don't have the sensibility to use a restroom (or at least fight somewhere other than the very public street outside the bar), you are not inebriated... you're an idiot. Not just local businesses either, fast food places and grocery stores who don't think twice to clean their parking lots and handle their trash properly. Why is it I have to watch my step entering any fast food place downtown because there's a line of grease coming from the front door?

I don't really have a solution for all of this, I just felt like ranting because I found it ridiculous that I had to tuck my face into my shirt (in 100 degree heat no less) from the smell of the city while walking to get groceries. I find it absolutely mind boggling that in an age of people screaming about how we should be living more green, no one is bothering to do the simplest task of picking up a broom and seeping the leaves from last fall out of the gutters. If I were in charge of the city, I'd throw out an ordnance and a tipline for people who don't clean out stuff on the streets that belong to them. Much like they do in the winter to people who refuse to shovel or salt their sidewalks. I'm not asking people to scrub everything down with a toothbrush or plant a tree, but just make an effort. Move the junk filled shopping carts and abandoned U-Haul trucks. Take a hose to the sidewalk and the building for a minute or two. Mow the grass out front if you have it. Overall, make a little effort to at least make the place look and smell nice. We can't do much about the soup above us, but we can at least stop some of it from going up. And since I know UTA won't do it, could someone hang a bunch of those air freshners around the Trax stations?!