#307 Waste not

Waste is an odd thing. One man’s waste is another’s sales opportunity. Our neighborhood had their neighborhood garage sale again this weekend. Now that it’s in its fourth year, with the same people participating, I just don’t get it. How do you build up so much that you want to get rid of in one year? At some point, you got to get something you like enough to keep. Is it possible to have garage sale after garage sale without actually going out and acquiring stuff specifically for garage sales? Of course not. In a way, I suppose I should be happy. I’m always going on about the importance of recycling. Some of these garage sale items haven’t seen the inside of a house in a decade. They’ve just been shuffled from garage to garage on the social biddy-ness circuit. That would make an interesting movie sometime, following a white elephant item from garage to garage all over town, taking a snapshot of each owner that acquires it, illuminating the pathos and bathos of their existence during its brief stay, then moving on to the next family vignette. I do believe garage sale denizens and/or practitioners form a cult in its own right. And that the buying and selling of garage sale items is less for the money or the use of the items and more for the social interaction and sharing of a almost spiritual bond. I don’t know you well enough to invite you into my home but please feel free to peruse my garage.
Contrast that with cigarette-dropper lady. The other day at one of the strip malls a lady got out of her car. She had two grown sons. They all had butts in their mouths. They didn’t appear to be in any hurry. The mom pulled a half-smoked cigarette from her mouth, dropped it to the sidewalk, still burning, and shuffled towards the video store. One of the sons puffed furiously on his, ground the butt under his heel and followed Mama in. The other son stood casually outside the entrance by a sand-filled ashtray, smoked his cigarette till it was done then suffocated the glowing ember in the sand. How different people are. You can calculate that I’m on the last son’s side of the social responsibility equation. Cigarettes are litter. Crushing them and leaving the butt on the pavement is a social affront—a discourteous act to the rest of us. Not that people like that care, they can’t be bothered with little niceties like common courtesy. Theirs is a rude and ultimately unhappy world. In the attempt to assert their right to do whatever the hell they please, they find themselves shunned by their fellow humans. The mom really got me—dropping the half-smoked burning cigarette to the ground in a perfect finger to the rest of the world. She didn’t look like she could afford the gesture. At five bucks a pack, a cigarette is worth 25 cents. I bet if she saw a quarter on the pavement, she’d have picked it up.
America, ya gotta love it.