THE APOPCALYPSE: CULTURE ON THE VERGE.

Apopcalyptic Column Debut! Dirty Girl, My Life Composting With Worms

While most get sucked in the e-muck of Perez or Facebook or YouTube, I age gracefully trolling websites about worms — glorious, segmented, slimy worms. Among my fave sites is brillz blog Red Worm Composting, from which I swiped the above pic on awesome post “Interesting Gift Ideas For Worm Fanatics.” Yes. You now know what to get me for Jizzy Chrizzy’s bday.

I love worms. I have two bins of worms transforming food scraps into “black gold” that I put on my plants. Over 2000 earthworms eat, sleep, poop, and make worm bebes doing the worm nasty in my apartment. It’s called vermicomposting, an eek-o chic way to deal with waste…

Here’s a lil something about worming. It’s the first in an Apopcalyptic confessional series about composting with worms. Enjoy!

A DIRTY GIRL: I AM WORMAN

I have worms. Lots and lots of worms. Thousands of them, kept in ventilated Rubbermaid bins in my garage, which when held in clumps look like brains made from writhing spaghetti. I feed my worms rotting garbage. I harvest their microbe-rich feces. The technical term for it is “vermicomposting,” but we could easily just call it digging in worm shit. And digging it, you dig? It’s the shit!

You wouldn’t expect it of me. I’m that hot girl you are always looking at on the subway. No really, I am! The one with black (plus some premature, crinkly, pubey white) hair and the size-order toes (no freaky long second one) and not much boobs, but that’s okay, because boobs can be trashy and/or distasteful, especially in tank tops, which I often wear (I love a breeze on bare pits, don’t you?).

Before you start gagging over the worms, get over yourself. True, earthworms (nerd name Eisenia fetida) are not exactly cute, because they don’t have the too-big eyes and bulbous heads that make Sanrio characters irresistible. Worms are blind, and they don’t have heads. They have a mouth end, which is difficult to distinguish from the butt end, which opens the floor up for butthead/head-in-your-ass jokes but not contented, googly sighs of adoration. Still, they’re benevolent creatures who turn food scraps into “black gold” for the earth. They’re the good guys.

(Not so with tapeworms, which I had the misfortune of hosting in my intestines, after spending several months in the Philippines as a toddler. I don’t remember much about it, just squirting out what I thought was a poo at my parents’ home back in Queens, only to have my grandmother scream and pluck from the toilet — two fingers! — a squirming, writhing cord.  In my memory, it resembles “Sesame Street’s” orange and red-striped worm celeb/Grouch-sidekick, Slimey. In Google images, it more accurately resembles a ghostly white, segmented horror of doom. ZOMG.)

I love the worms. I love raking through their muck with what famed Worm Woman Mary Appelhof (from whom I purchased my first worm bin online, RIP, now food for worms) calls a Worm Fork, which is really just a hand hoe, which really just sounds like what they called this girl in high school who supplied five-fingered affections to boys on the concrete steps behind school.

Speaking of that, did you know that earthworms are hermaphrodites? (And no, Jamie Lee Curtis is NOT a hermaphrodite. Let her be, already!) They have ovaries and testes and lie all over each other swapping boy and girl juices not unlike humans. Cocoons, where worm babies come from, are formed in the clitellum, the thickened gland with the pervy sounding name that spans a worm’s circumference the way an elegant fur muff might shield your hands from cold.

Is my hotness and all of this worm sex talk turning you on?

Diarrhea!

Ha, ha. That word’s always better than a cold shower.

There are many ways to vermicompost: in bins, in stacked trays, in the soil, indoors, outdoors, inside out and round and round. There are many ways to do it wrong, committing mass wormicide. I’ve had worms rot in a stinking anaerobic mess of too-much food waste, I’ve had them dry to crispy curlicues after mass escapes.

Still, that’s all behind me now. I got my second worm bin free on craigslist last year, knowing full well cheap worms are hard to find when you don’t have a horse manure pile, which I don’t here in Queens, though the scraggly mutts on my block do their Mr. Ed on my patch of a front yard, pinching wet loaves stippled with rice-and-beans and chicken fat. (By the way, I am looking for someone who specializes in leaving flaming bags of doggy-do on the front steps of irresponsible dog owners. If you know of one, please drop me a line.)

In the two years I’ve been vermicomposting,  I’ve become something of a pro at this, and god, don’t think I don’t dream of going pro at this. My theme song would be “I Am Worman, Hear Me Roar” and I’d march around the stadium to wild fans whacking worm-shaped thunder sticks emblazoned with my name.

“Worm-an! Worm-an!” they’d all chant.

I’d step to the mound/midline/net and raise a humble hand, and after belting out the national anthem begin to talk into the mic, telling them all my adventures with worming: the red mite invasions, the foodscraps I’ve saved, the secret files I have shredded to pad the ecosystem (bedding, it’s called), the underaged sk8r bois on my block I have tried to seduce: “Hey guys, want to see my worms? Come closer, closer…”

Until then, I’ve just got this column to confess to.

And I’m just worming up.

*POP!*

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