Scavenging

I know you've seen them. On the eve of garbage day, there they are, in their cars, rolling slow like the setup to a gangland drive-by shooting. But they are not looking for victims, they are looking for garbage.

I have learned that there is a whole sub-culture built around trash trolling. These devotees of what I call "Neo-Vulturism" roam the city grid looking for something they like amongst the heaps of curbside trash that we "normal" people discard.

The economics of this have always astounded me. I have a hard time balancing the equation inferred by someone idling a $40,000 brand-new SUV on $4 gas for ten minutes as they try to decide if my 30-year-old broom with the broken handle is worth taking or not. It is almost as if I am missing something huge, some property of this thing I threw away that I cannot see, but that makes it valuable beyond measure. But what?

Being in the midst of a spring-home-on-the-market super-clean-up as we are, we had a huge pile of useless crap to get rid of this week. It took up half of our (what do you call that strip of lawn in between the sidewalk and curb - tree lawn?) curbside lawn. The pile had kitchen trash. It had branches. It had old ripped air mattresses. It had broken tools. It had old picture frames. In short, it had a bunch of smelly useless crap.

It was like gold to the Neo-Vultures. I counted at least 20 cars. First the broken broom handles went. Then the old rusty waste paper basket. After dark, the carcass that was our garbage was veritably picked clean. I was almost surprised this morning when I noticed that they left the big mushy bag of dirty diapers. Apparently they do have standards.

I had this thought. It would be interesting to put something really strange out sometime, just to see what happens. A dead maggoty raccoon maybe, or a big pile of dirty syringes, or perhaps a severed human leg. That would really be something. Only problem is, where do you get a human leg from, legally? Maybe that isn't such a great idea after all.