the circle of [trash] life

Back when I was a boy scout (in the age before the oughts), the scoutmaster - my father - used to volunteer the troop's services at the local large-item/recycling dropoff point (conveniently located in the parking lot shared by the first aid squad, Dept. of Public Works, and the forklift-jousting field erected by the men of the Dept. of Public Works).  There, the townspeople would drive up in their Range Rovers and Ford Planeteater (tm) SUV's with junk that they wished to recycle.  Occasionally, as cited by Pops in his weekly guided meditation (used by those who cannot grasp Kierkegaard's tantric-like inspirirational qualities), people would ask us questions, which I would, of course, use as an opportunity to misdirect. 

("Sure, you've got about three feet of space [until the twenty foot drop between the road and the surface where dumpsters were located]; keeeep backing up....")

("Absolutely, benzene and lighter fluid should be deposited in the dumpster marked 'mixed paper.'")

In between saving people from my attempts at making art through public disservice, my father, the scoutmaster, scanned the large-item drop off items for, as he put it, "the good stuff." 

"We could use this refrigerator.  It just needs a little work," he would say with glee. 

"It has no door," I would answer. 

"We can build a door for it.  Or use it as an air conditioner." 

"Don't we have a fridge already?"

"Well, what about this television?"

"Dad, I think televisions usually come with cathode ray tubes."  [For those of you joining us from the modern age, this was back when there were two types of television: color and black & white.  Black & white was the passenger pidgeon of the day.]

About once a month, we'd come home with .... something.  A couch.  A six-foot wide cabinet turntable, complete with thirty year old Tito Puente records.  My brother.  One would think that, at this point, my mother would have gone postal on my father.  She didn't want this sort of, well, junk in the house (particularly the destructive force of Tito Puente).  Instead, I was the one that took the potato masher to the gut. 

"How can you let him take that couch home?  There's a bloodstain on it!"

"You try arguing with a judge who is set on an eighty year old piece of fabric, mold and foam cushioning," I responded.  I didn't tell her that my father promised that I could go to the nearby Barnes & Noble if I helped him lift the couch into his battered white van. 

I believe this was how Charles Starkweather convinced Caril Ann Fugate to join him in inspiring an entire Springsteen album. 

Comments

[Hondo]

"Dad, I think televisions usually come with cathode ray tubes."

So I'm not the only one that remembers "tubes." I remember my father openning up the back of the TV set periodically to "jiggle" the tubes to get the set to work. How did we ever survive in such primitive times?

[pops]

Tantric?

The Danes?

Then this must be what the legal profession considers the Kama Sutra.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/people/236422_people15.html

Some anthropologists think that early man was not a hunter but a scavenger. As Joe Jackson once said, "If so there goes your proof."

The principal at Mr. Man's school told me that all four of her grandparents came from Denmark. I'll run your Kierkegaard theory past her. God knows I haven't given the PTA a reason to get 'em in a wad for months.

It's as good a place as any to start.

[TPB, Esq.]

Great. Now I'm going to have that song stuck in my head all day.

Not that I can complain that strongly; Jackson's a favorite of mine. "Different For Girls" and "Be My Number Two" are favorites of mine.

[Sluggo]

This is so disturbing. I'm not judicious, but otherwise more like your father than any boy scout. A thirty-five year record of failure has not disabused me of the notion that I can fix anything. Maybe Martin Sheen will play me in the movie.

[TPB, Esq.]

Don't get me wrong. I can fix things - in fact, I like fixing things - but I don't like projects. I fix things when they have to be fixed. Otherwise, I leave garbage to the dump and those that need to "do" something (a.k.a., create a bigger mess than already existed).