|
|
|
dumpster protocol
Sunday, October 1 2000
The other day Matt Rogers sent me an interesting link to a half-baked article on the subject of something its author calls biostatus. The article purports to explain why we feel depressed when bad things happen and why we feel ecstatic when things are going our way. According to the hypothesis advanced, our "biostatus" is an unbribable watcher entity burrowed in our subconscious that rewards us when we succeed and punishes and discourages us when we fail. It all made good sense to me, but I'm still left wondering why it would serve any advantage at all for someone to be so discouraged that he would just want to lie around in bed all day.
In the afternoon I went on my usual Sunday afternoon bike ride through the neighborhood alleys just east of Bundy Drive and south of Rochester Avenue. I came upon a dumpster that had been freshly-filled by someone who was evidently moving out and going far, far away. This was clear because of the nature of the stuff being abandoned: pots and pans, cups and saucers, teapots and strainers, sheets and blankets, most of them in perfectly good condition. I took everything I could carry and went back several times for more. On several of these return trips I encountered competitor trash pickers, shopping-cart-pushing-bums mostly, and I left them alone. The protocol I follow is that a dumpster belongs to whomever is picking through it, until that person moves on.
The things I managed to score from this single dumpster included two steel teapots, a whole set of excessively floral sake glasses, a stack of plastic dinner plates, a large teflon-lined pot, and, most importantly, a set of clean sheets and a blanket. The sheets and blanket were overly floral and girlie-girl (both in appearance and fragrance), but up until this point my bedding had been mismatched, incomplete, and (for the most part) increasingly unhygienic. The plates were a good score too; in the aftermath of Kim's departure I had been left with only one dinner plate.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?001001 feedback
previous | next |
