Junk Removal Business Run Along the Lines of a No-kill Animal Shelter

I brought my wife home some salad tongs that appear to be horn or shell. Perhaps carved from a giant toenail. I can’t quite tell what it is. Was it the ability to make tools that brought us all the grief? Imagine a life without tools, where we weren’t looking for resources to extract to convert to something else. The original forests would still be here, and the buffalo, and homing pigeons and do-do birds and all the rest. All gone because we want tongs for our salad.

I’ve been at this for more than ten years now, and the thrill is tarnished and scratched. Or is that a rich patina that adds to the value? Depends on how stiff and sore I am when I wake up.

I really do love stuff, and I picture myself the owner of a junk removal business run along the lines of a no-kill animal shelter. The work involved in NOT throwing things out is far greater than just sledge-hammering the walls of a dresser in. I’m bothered by smashing a dresser up and throwing it in the landfill. It weighs on me. But no one wants a knotty pine dresser stained dark sitting on bun feet. I’ll be storing that for two more decades until the furniture fashions come back around. So I take out the sledgehammer and start smashing skulls. It’s terrible.

If it’s mid-century modern, no problem, someone will buy it. That's what “the kids” want. Older people like the older styles, but they already have their dresser. And just think how many dressers there are in the world. Remember, at some point in the 1600s the drawer was finally invented. That means only the rich had chests with drawers - poor people kept clothes in low wooden chests without drawers, your underwear touching your waistcoats. How many “chests of drawers” have been built since 1685? How many have been smashed up because they just weren’t fashionable? Almost all of them. So who am I fooling? Saving one or two for a few years means nothing. An ice cube in the ocean.

This is the burden of choice. The garbage we manufacture. It’s great, isn’t it, having an existential crisis every day at work?

The dump truck is 14 feet long, seven feet wide, with walls going up 4 feet in the air. The crew can put an uncluttered two-bedroom home in this rolling box. A sledgehammer and a screw gun make it fit a little easier.

What you’re looking at is the back door swung open at the transfer station’s tipping floor, and a compacted slice of the kitchen cabinet contents folded in with a bedroom closet’s coat hangers.

Add one wicker laundry basket, Coffee Mate powdered milk substitute, and three blank cassette tapes in their hard plastic cases. The recipe of a good life?

Some will look for something to save in this mix, and other people see garbage they wouldn’t touch. I am a savior, I am a junkie. I say keep it all. It feels bad to throw this stuff away, but I’ve run out of space to keep things I don’t need. I’ve become a preacher saving other people’s sins.

It’s true, someone may want something here. Yes, it seems like a waste to get rid of it all. Much of this could be used again. But there is nothing holy here. WANTING LESS is the only way to reduce waste.

Then again, that kind of thinking puts people out of business. I want to keep working, right?