our community has a neighborhood trash pickup once a year. this year, it's set for August 8. we can put anything out on the curb, and on the 8th sanitation workers will haul it off in a gigantic garbage truck. this is perfect timing for our big move, so we put out all of our shit today. our curbside is literally piled four feet high with junk. we are distilling down our lives to the barest necessities.
one of the strangest things about this annual ritual is the picking through of our stuff that occurs. unending streams of people (on foot, in trucks, on bicycle) stop by the various piles and pilfer anything worth anything. even while we were piling our lives by the curb, people stopped by to pillage it.
a neighbor even took one of my wife's old high school yearbooks. this freaked her out. it is strange. i don't even want to know what the hell this guy is going to do with her yearbook.
anyway, it's amazing how much shit we've accumulated over the years. how much of it is unnecessary and superfluous. but, even more amazing, is how much shit we've deemed necessary to our lives.
3 comments:
justin,
I always feel the way you are talking about when we have a garage sale. People picking through our crap. But I am not a saver anymore. So, we rarely have garage sales anymore.
That is too weird about the guy and the yearbook...did she go to school with him or something?
Kat:
no, she didn't got to school with him. she went to school in Florida. why some 20-something kid would want a Florida high school yearbook from the late 80s or early 90s is beyond me.
yeah, garage sales are always so weird. i've written a couple of poems about it. about how people just pick through the accumulation of your lives, and haggle for your memories. everything to the highest bidder.
Chris:
yeah, that's kind of the creepy thoughts we were having. maybe he has some sick fetish for kids.
my thoughts? i am hoping that he is some kind of loser who is looking for ideas to write in yearbooks. my wife saw him take the book and she said he was about 20. i'm hoping he's younger and is just looking for ideas for when he autographs yearbooks. if, in fact, he is 20-something, then i just don't want to think about it.
I had a thought...maybe he wants to see clothes or hair styles? From that time? I think I'm thinking that because I don't want to think he has a child fetish!
Post a Comment