The Dumpster Herm.
In the south I recall rural dumpsters, placed along country roads, that were places of free exchange. Most anything that had any potential re-use value was gleaned from them.
Some time ago, I cleaned out my apartment, packed a few boxes of surplus clothing and knick-knacky kind of crap, and set it out alongside the dumpster. Within a few days almost everything was taken except for some tiny plastic nativity figures, about one inch big, painted gold. They were strewn in the grass where they lay in semi-concealment - concealed to all but those who bother to survey such places (see Bluebird Game below) - cast there by someone who had up-ended a box to better surmise its contents (or whatever they were doing). Also left behind was an empty one gallon metal paint thinner can. So I took the paint thinner can and, cutting an 'x' in it, rolled the metal back as neatly as I could. Then I glued the nativity figures inside. I hung a jack that I found from the top of the can with thread. To be the star of Bethlehem. Representing the missing figure of the infant Jesus I substituted a marble.
Another time I set some books out by the dumpster. Most were taken, but one was cast aside, purposefully tossed into the dumpster as an editorial gesture of some perambulatory critic. The volume which was forsook by sundry passersby was an old religious biography of a Reverend Redfield. I fished the book out of the dumpster and took it back inside, where I clipped from its pages words and pictures to paste together and reconstitute an extremely edited version of the story. It�s perhaps a vestigial trait of being raised on literature filtered through Reader�s Digest magazine, pursuant with my mail order degree from a tiny and distant university that no-one has ever heard of or is ever likely to. I like taking an ax to other�s works. I don�t always preserve the sense or style of the thing, but I flatter myself that some crumb worth saving has been preserved from consignment to the county dump forever.
I like this method of weeding one's possessions; trial by dumpster. I'm thinking of inviting people into my home to take whatever they will. Then whatever's left over, the unselected, will be truly mine somehow (though I'm not sure how, exactly.)
(Add: The Bluebird Game)
Here is a game that the Bluebirds play.
The following is excerpted from Luc Sante's fine short article The Black Market;
"Once upon a time, not all that long ago, the island of Manhattan was a sheltering and accommodating environment, with a balanced ecosystem, reasonably friendly to strays and fledglings and misfits. The street was a great river, which picked up and deposited flotsam and jetsam with whimsical and inarguable unpredictability, and all the little creatures of glen and dale could feed off its eddies, their hopes kept on a level bearing by the distributive force of luck. If you needed something you could look around; if you possessed something you didn't require you could just set it out in front of your house, and the street would carry it away within minutes."
{Luc Sante, The Black Market, in Slant, issue #7, Fall 1996, pp. 29.
Slant is a free newspaper produced by Urban Outfitters.}
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