I go dumpster diving

I spent about eight hours yesterday dumpster diving. Or, more accurately, dumpster loading. With a few other folks I helped a friend get rid of lots of unwanted stuff that was clogging up her carport and basement. My job ended up being the trash arranger. People would leave junk on the end of the industrial-sized dumpster, and I’d walk back and forth with loads of discards, carefully placing material for maximum space utilization.

This is me and my dumpster early on in our relationship. We got to know each other much more intimately as the day wore on, which ended with the sun setting and the dumpster completely filled. At this point I was still in my neatest and tidiest stage: boards and other lumber on the sides, buckets of junk in the middle, old bicycle wheels interlocking and overlapping vertically, small trash thrown over larger trash to fill voids.

It was generally agreed by my co-workers that this was the neatest dumpster they had ever seen. I basked in their compliments, which stimulated me to redouble my efforts to fill the dumpster as near to capacity as possible. It was great to discover a talent that I never knew I had: junk arranging.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to think of any way that I can profit from this hitherto unrecognized artistic ability. I can envision me starring in some sort of performance art perhaps, but the logistics of getting the dumpster and sufficient trash to various theatres seems overwhelming. So this probably was a one-time exhibition of my talent to an admiring audience of six.

Well, not so admiring by the middle of the afternoon. I began hearing muttered comments from the people hauling junk out of the basement, up a flight of stairs, across the carport, and to me and the dumpster. “You’re doing too good a job,” they’d say, taking a look at how slowly the cavernous interior was filling up.

Such is art. You can’t please everybody. I had to follow my greasy, dirty muse. But when I started carrying stuff up the stairs myself, I began to empathize more with my co-workers. Stuff started to be thrown in at random, and the dumpster doors soon were able to be closed upon my now-hidden handiwork.

Tomorrow my artistic expression will be hauled away. I like to think that as the trash truck operator dumps his load, he will take a glance at the patterns of the descending junk and think to himself, “How lovely. This is a dumpster to be remembered.”