Every Broken Thing: on making a voice

If you’ve spent time with a toddler you might know of the show Trash Truck. It follows the friendship between a little boy and a sentient garbage truck who possesses the vulnerable demeanor of Harry from Harry and the Hendersons, and it is vaguely apocalyptic- it looks like it’s set in a southwestern wasteland dotted with remnants of suburban sprawl. However this is not what strikes me most in 2025.

The friendships between children and inanimate objects in our modern Pixar- cannon are usually poignant without being truly grim. They represent wonder, a feral country that grown ups no longer have access to, and they help us to see the soulfulness, the magic of everyday.

And then there are shows like Trash Truck that remind us, at least me, of the underlying sadness of those friendships. As a child I was so enraptured by my Dreambox clock radio that I believed a world hummed in its squat white lacquered body where I was one of the Supremes, and Diana Ross and Smokey Robinson loved me and sang me to sleep each night. Inevitably life would intrude on this fantasy and the rupture was painful. Even as a child I knew this- it is lonely to be friends with an object, even in the land of imagination where it can love you back.

But I want to tell you about an episode called Lost Voice. The little boy, whose name is Hank, loses his voice after being sick. Trash Truck and other friends, including a rat and raccoon, are desperate to help him speak again and so they take a tin can and search for sounds to fill it with: trickling water, a squeaky door hinge, wind in the leaves. They fill up the can with all the broken music they find and bring it back to their friend, so he might take what’s in the can and speak.

I’ve been procrastinating a lot lately. Moving around peripheries, as if stalking what I’m truly after in the hedges but lacking conviction to truly go after it.

In the essay “procrastination as creative process,” (Uppercase Magazine), Molly Meng writes that the key to not procrastinating is procrastinating. “I avoid the known (of her regular creative work) in the hope that a yet creative unknown will show itself to me.” She cheers us procrastinators on: lean into it, make your detour the main event! It is still an act of creation, even if it’s a stop, even if it feels like you’re coasting, or shirking or whatever word you use to dismiss your essential and good act of making things.

I have been making collages, a hobby which began with new years’ vision board-making, and maybe used to feel like “not-working” but has turned into something more strange and propulsive, more vital to how I make sense of how I feel.

Similarly, I have been listening to sound-diaries- such as the magical Found Sounds podcast - which allow me to understand a person by hearing what they hear, dissolving into their soundscape. A sonic collaging.

Maybe my dreambox did love me back. I know it gave me a voice, seeped its music into me, a voice drenched in Boston accents and golden oldies and static and winter stars. I wish I still had it. For a long time starting after college, it lived in a cardboard box, like a little electronic heart measuring the minutes of my life, still smudged with the prints of my 8 year old hands fumbling for it in the dark.

Is this making a voice? Is procrastinating, the way Meng describes it, a way of finding it again, in a new form?

Right now, how do we find our voice? How do we find it ever, but especially after rupture, after losing the dreamed world we inhabited?

Find your tin can. Fill it to the brim.

I think another way of saying that is, love the world, every broken thing.