Paper Paper: July 2010

To start, I found this old flyer recently. Not in the trash but while salvaging some other goods

With all that's been going on, I've neglected reporting on one of the PP's favorite topics: "Christmas in the Spring", the Shop-til-you-drop-inside-a-metal-box Extravaganza, the Annual Free Ninety-Nine Giveaway. That's right! End of the school year Dumpsterrr Divinginging!!!

Two things changed the game for me this year. For starters, my roommate and I were moving out in May and the idea of taking in more stuff seemed out of the question (especially as I sorted through all the stuff we salvaged last year that only ever gathered dust). Use it or lose it. Secondly, further downsizing in my life lead me to get rid of my car. It wasn't exactly a planned action but since the city is small, I can get by on my bike and I like it that way. One of the drawbacks of course is that I could no longer just roll up on the spot, put the junk in the trunk, and speed off like a true trash bandit. So I'm off my furniture hoarding game these days.

But did this really mean the end of Christmas in May? Did I just have to accept the new circumstances as the end of my dumpster binges? Is this part of growing up and leaving the college scene behind? Friends still texted me with the location of plentiful looking piles uptown that they passed by with me in mind. But being across town with not enough horse power I would just sigh and close my phone, wipe the tear from my eye and tell myself to buck up. "You're growing up now, boy. You must leave that trash be..." Aww, alas. But there really were bigger piles of shit to worry about. This years harvest would have to go ungleaned and I decided to accept it as fate.

Until the day of the Big Score. It came upon me as surprise, like landing the monster catfish just have you've decided to hang up yer reels. This was late June: my friend and roommate of ye ol' ex-girl called me up to come over and hang out. Or at least that was the laid back impression I had about how we would pass the time. When I arrived I found in the midst of trying to sweep out the mess that remained from her other vacated roomies in a frenzied attempt to get her security deposit back. The other girls had left her with a sinking ship and a whole lot of ballast she needed to jettison. The situation looked hopeless but I didn't let that on to her.

I began cooking myself lunch out of the pile of pantry goods and spoke to her in a calming voice telling her things she needed to hear. "Yeah, I'm sure you can get your deposit back... Don't worry about that now... just focus on the task at hand...let it go, its going in the trash...blah blah." Having just moved out a few weeks before I understood her panic and certainly did not envy the situation. Roommates that move out before each other often delude themselves into thinking they're being generous by leaving behind cool stuff that they couldn't make room for. These unwanted gifts turn into only more deadweight when it comes down to crunch time and the roommates (who think of themselves as being so generous for leaving behind there nice heavy speakers for someone else) are actually cursed loudly for leaving early and leaving behind all that shit in there place.

My own roommate left a week or two before our lease was up and didn't even bother to take his posters off the wall, much less sweep out his room or even touch the kitchen filled with all his dishes and utensils. Wiping out the fridge isn't something you think to do with days to spare before leaving. But when there's 12 hours left on the lease and you remember the $500 your landlord has, you realize its just one of many tasks that must be reckoned with before you go.

Such was the situation I found my friend Reeni in. We worked on the kitchen, scrubbing surfaces and pitching perfectly good condiments that no longer had a place of their own. It pained Reeni to toss that special jar of terayaki but I played the bad guy with her and assured her she had to do it. It truly is a goddam shame about all the perfectly good stuff that gets thrown out during a move but what options do you have when time is short? Such is the dilemma many have faced and really the whole reason "dumpster diving" season is so plentiful. Often times (when its not put into an actual dumpster) people aren't callously throwing away there formerly-prized possessions. Things put out on the curb are placed with high hopes that they will be picked up before the trashman comes and can find a new, more loving home. That's what I found myself doing at the end of the month at least. You wait until after the daily rain shower and you keep the good stuff out of black bags where it would be hidden and overlooked.

As I took bag after bag to the curb, I started to hone in on what real treasures remained. Reeni and the girls are a crafty bunch and they had amassed a good amount of hardware that I had my eye on. The real X-factor in the whole clean up operation though were the clan of kittens in the house recently born to the stray the girls had adopted. "Tiny Cat," who begat 5 even tinier cats, had showed up some months earlier and only gotten out once since then, just long enough to get mysteriously knocked up and burden the girls with 5 more adorable beings. But now they all fell to Reeni and they shat through out her empty rooms a little too dumb and tiny to figure out how to climb into the litter boxes strategically placed throughout the vacant house. I tried to convince her that with a brick and a burlap sack, Old Man River would be just the right guy to take them in but Reeni wasn't swayed. I shrugged and continued to gather up the loot I'd been eying, preparing to make my final exit.

One of the last things I grabbed off the wall was this black and white flyer that made me think of an old party and the ol' girl who drew it. I used it later to catalog all the stuff I made out with from Reeni's Ol' Housey Poo. Then with another shrug and a hug I thanked Reeni and washed my hands of the spot, not looking back with a basket full of crap! (Dunno if she ever got her deposit back)

DAmn. Not a bad day at all. And if I could get only one this year, not a bad haul either. Christmas in June! Hope you got to celebrate it.

Are people seriously sleeping on this awesome Mermaid story I posted??
Its the best short story I've ever read! Just try to find one wasted sentence, you can't. Look fer one paragraph without beautiful haunting imagery, there isn't one!

I've gotten reports that some people are turned off by the idea of reading scanned script on screens and have thus neglected checking it ou. But I'm confident that you will find there is no need to strain your eyeballs if you click on the image once to open it and then click on it a second time to enlarge it. This makes the letters plenty big. Please read it; I implore you.

This pics come from another lovely little seafaring tale I picked up yesterday at the comic book shop.

*ASIDE: I tell you there's no place like the comic book shop for me! When I go in that place it's feels like entering a cathedral on Easter Sunday: all my fears fall off of me and I just want to rejoice. I mean it, that place is better than a therapy session

**(TrueStory about Me&Therapy, abridged from a couple of weeks ago- "Me: Well Doc, I've been feeling a little anxious about all the current events lately
Mz.Therapist: Oh I know, you're telling me! Get this: Yesterday I could smell the oil in the air!!
M: (yikes!)
T: But you think that's bad?! Let me tell you about my Katrina story...Ok looks like that's it. Do you want to come back next week?" !RealTalk:P)

But check this out and then go back and check out that shorty story by Gina Oschner (originally published in the Black Warrior Review, a great litereay mag from the Univ. of Alabama) This is from Abe Sapien: the Abyssal Plain, a dope comic book. Mind the shuffled up order of the pages.