Bulky Trash Day
The small town I live in has a bulky trash collection every year. You heap old junk you don’t want on the curb, and the city waste agency picks it up. For those wanting to de-clutter their homes or score free finds, bulky trash day is a dream scenario. People haul out their hefty rubbish a few days early so passersby can salvage the choicest items before it all gets carted away.
But most of the scavengers come out at dusk the night before pickup and root around through rotting boards and rusting patio furniture like Earthly versions of the Jawas from Star Wars. My husband and I are scavengers, too. It’s so voyeuristic to sift through the grubby castoff innards of outwardly tidy dwellings. Sometimes you can piece together past lives through the mildewed shelves, brittle plastic baby toys, stained mattresses, and cobwebbed odds and ends that seemingly proliferate from nowhere. The change of venue transforms objects and cruelly exposes them: a sofa in a house is lived-in furniture, but a sofa on the sidewalk is an eyesore.
This year I put out my worn-down 1965 Singer sewing machine and an expensive but mechanically flawed electric mixer, and I was happy to see them both disappear from the curb within the hour; I had loved those appliances in their functionality, and was hoping someone else could love them out of their brokenness. It’s comforting to think that your junk can gain a second or third life. People don’t like to throw things away—it seems so wasteful. Bulky trash day provides the illusion that yes, someone will see the potential in your hulking, outdated seventeen-inch computer monitor or your water-stained gypsum boards.
Bulky trash day is a fun spectator sport, but it dredges up all kinds of melancholy truths about how our society alternately covets and discards…stuff. Even the most pathetic examples of junk begin as shiny new merchandise. Walk along the streets in my neighborhood on the eve of bulky trash collection and you’ll see the detritus of ravenous consumerism before it recycles lower on the food chain or dies a sputtering, tawdry death at the dump. Today’s treasure is tomorrow’s bulky trash, and hopefully…another man’s treasure.
But most of the scavengers come out at dusk the night before pickup and root around through rotting boards and rusting patio furniture like Earthly versions of the Jawas from Star Wars. My husband and I are scavengers, too. It’s so voyeuristic to sift through the grubby castoff innards of outwardly tidy dwellings. Sometimes you can piece together past lives through the mildewed shelves, brittle plastic baby toys, stained mattresses, and cobwebbed odds and ends that seemingly proliferate from nowhere. The change of venue transforms objects and cruelly exposes them: a sofa in a house is lived-in furniture, but a sofa on the sidewalk is an eyesore.
This year I put out my worn-down 1965 Singer sewing machine and an expensive but mechanically flawed electric mixer, and I was happy to see them both disappear from the curb within the hour; I had loved those appliances in their functionality, and was hoping someone else could love them out of their brokenness. It’s comforting to think that your junk can gain a second or third life. People don’t like to throw things away—it seems so wasteful. Bulky trash day provides the illusion that yes, someone will see the potential in your hulking, outdated seventeen-inch computer monitor or your water-stained gypsum boards.
Bulky trash day is a fun spectator sport, but it dredges up all kinds of melancholy truths about how our society alternately covets and discards…stuff. Even the most pathetic examples of junk begin as shiny new merchandise. Walk along the streets in my neighborhood on the eve of bulky trash collection and you’ll see the detritus of ravenous consumerism before it recycles lower on the food chain or dies a sputtering, tawdry death at the dump. Today’s treasure is tomorrow’s bulky trash, and hopefully…another man’s treasure.
posted by Lefty at 10:47 AM
1 Comments:
Good story. Why is your posting so far down below the title? Check it and see. Eh!
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