It’s rough out there on the streets, man.
The fruits of my labors.
This is all the towels and bedding I scavenged during move-out week. Rather than end up rotting in the rain, or hauled to a landfill, it went to the Humane Society. I also had five huge bags of perfectly good clothing that I donated to Goodwill. And this is only a fraction of the stuff that got thrown away by departing students.
I’m already thinking ahead to next year. This year, I only focused on my immediate neighborhood for logistical reasons: I just didn’t have the space in my cluttered, crowded basement to sort, wash, and store any more stuff than I brought home. And I had to wash at least half of it, because otherwise it was going to stink up the basement with a combined funk of mildew, garbage, and the disgusting flowery-perfumy chemical reek of scented cosmetics, candles, and cleaning products. Seriously–college-aged women buy the most aggressively perfumed shit imaginable, and if I didn’t wash things as soon as I brought them home, the cloying stink would have fouled my basement for months.
So next year? I’m planning ahead. I’m going to get the basement cleared out, so I have space to deal with more bags of stuff. I’m going to come up with a better means for hauling larger loads home from further afield. I’m going to use the laundromat to wash everything that needs it, rather than grind away a it one load at a time in my aging home washer and dryer. I’d like to double, or even triple the amount of donations I make, and spread it out across more groups who could use it.
As sick of doing laundry as I got, and as insane as I started to think I was for going to all that effort, I had a great time doing this; it was immensely satisfying seeing all of those bags stacked by the fence, knowing everything in them would be put to good use. I don’t know why I didn’t start doing this years ago, but now that I’ve done it, I’m looking forward to making it an annual event.
Bad Dad.
I generally take a dim view of all the little shitbag taggers who keep defacing my neighborhood, but I can’t help but laugh on whenever Bad Dad makes an infrequent appearance. This is an old pic, and not even a good example of his/her/its work, but I smiled when I found it on an old flash drive, so there you have it.
Haiku.
This is the University District. And sometimes the graffiti truly reflects that.
That’s how you might see their colors with a telepathic hallucinogen scanner.
Strolling along Fremont toward my bus stop on 46th Ave N, I saw this solid mass of text stapled to a telephone pole.
Still being a dead-tree, text-based sort of human, I naturally stopped to read it.
This? This is why I’ve got to clean out my house.
I started this linocut over a year ago. It’s actually two blocks, each 6 x 9″ (~15 x 22 cm). I did the radiator first, then decided to do the extension cord in the foreground. I also have two additional, half-carved blocks that include other parts of the room, and eventually this will be a full-sheet, multi-block image. This is just a poorly-inked proof made on sketch paper; the finished prints will be amazing.
But I can’t find the blocks. They’re wrapped together in newsprint, and I can see the packet in my mind’s eye, but I cannot find the damned thing to save my life.
And there are so many other things that have just sort of vanished amid the chaos, and it’s driving me insane. I should do a major cleanout at least once a year, but it’s been almost five years since I did the last one, and I am up to my eyeballs in clutter and I simply cannot function. I barely have room to make art at all. And every time I need something and can’t find it, I go into a rage–mainly at myself for letting things get so bad.
Anyone who tells you that a messy desk, or room, or house is a sign of a creative mind–well, they may be right. But I’ll tell you this, from experience: it’s also the sign of a creative mind that can’t fully express itself because it hasn’t got the space and can’t find the tools it needs in order to do that.
Trash day.
I got up early this morning to take out my own trash, and took a stroll up and down the alley. The nice house that’s always full of shitty tenants had an enormous pile of trash in the parking area, and it turned out to be a gold mine. A dozen bath towels, several throw blankets, a comforter, a set of orange sheets, and loads of white t-shirts (which make the best paining and printmaking rags). I also walked away with a couple dozen sample jars of house paint, and had I been willing to dig I suspect I could have turned up more; I swear the landlords must have sampled every dark grayed-brown and off-white Sherwin-Williams offers. I can always find a use for it.
Further up the alley, I got more towels, another small dog bed, and an assortment pack of nail polish–not all of it wearable colors, but I’m sure I’ll find a craft use for it.
Oh, and I did find one book–an accounting textbook. But that is the one and lonely-only book for this year.
I hadn’t planned on taking a stroll in the neighborhood, but got my handcart and bungee cords and went out anyway. I scored more bath towels, a couple of throw blankets, and another pair of cushions off the back of a couch (this time in a tan cotton twill I can live with).
So the Humane Society will be making out like bandits this year. Once I’d dumped everything out on the basement floor and saw how much I’ve dragged home all in one spot, I had a real “Holy shit!” moment.
There may be a few stray bits put out tonight, but Student Moveout 2015 has effectively come to an end. Now it’s time to get all of this stuff dried, bagged, and taken to where it can do the most good.
Kartchella.
We’ve had a break in the rain, so I went out scavenging again this morning.
Scored: A plastic Adirondack chair in a horrid shade of menstrual pink (but I’ve got spray paint for plastic that will mitigate that). A stainless-steel mixing bowl. A cigar box with glass inset in the lid that sort of begs for me to get all Joseph Cornell on it—-plus five cigars, still dry and in the original wrappings. I’ve never smoked a cigar in my life, but I might just give it a go to see what the fuss is about. A bag of whole-bean coffee from the Dominican Republic, unopened. One bottle of cheap vodka, opened and half-drunk; I can use the vodka for purposes other than human consumption, and the cobalt-blue plastic bottle will be cut up for a craft project. One bottle of Margarita mix, unopened. Two pint glasses. More t-shirts. Two regular pillows, and one double-length one with a furry cover. A fleece throw blanket. A huge transparent orange plastic jar that used to hold whey supplement; I’ll cut it up and use the plastic in the same craft project as the blue plastic vodka bottle.
Oh, and the same house that yielded all of the men’s clothing last night had even more when I went back to look in full daylight. It’s all soaked from the rain, but I’ll just hang it up to dry and send it off to Goodwill. It’s all perfectly good stuff, and I’ll easily fill three large trash bags with it, but rather than donate it the dude just tossed it. This happens every year, and I’m always astounded at how much usable clothing and how many household items get thrown away.
And I admit it got me to contemplating narcissism, and how, to a narcissist, anything they don’t personally value is garbage and thus can’t possibly have value to anyone else. (Then again, having grown up with a narcissist, I admit I contemplate narcissism a lot. So there you have it.)
At any rate, there are lots of moving vans and parental SUVs cruising the ‘hood today, so later this afternoon when I no longer have to play dodge ‘em I’ll go back out to see what fresh leavings there might be. But I couldn’t resist taking a break to post pictures of the best scavenging find so far this year:
Scavenging in the rain.
Today was wonderfully rainy and cool–but also windy. Reddit’s Seattle sub is packed with pics of downed trees and branches, including part of a huge chestnut not far from my house. And speaking of chestnuts, the downed seed pods are everywhere, thanks to the wind. They’re also unusually large, perhaps due to this summer’s heat.
So today I opted to stay in and hang out on the couch with a book, coffee, and cats, but I did venture out briefly this evening to see if the departing students had left me anything good.
From the nice house with always-shitty tenants three doors down, I scored several bath towels in excellent condition, which will go to the Humane Society. They’re also getting a small dog bed, a fleece throw blanket, a cotton bath mat, and a couple more beach towels, all scavenged from other dumpsters and trash cans in my own alley.
I also dragged home a huge trove of men’s clothing, all in excellent shape, from one of the houses two doors up. The young men living there left a huge pile of cast-offs and garbage in their driveway, and I’m sure if I did more digging I’d find more worth taking. But it was getting dark, the rain was pelting down, and everything was soaked (including me), making it hard enough to wrestle with the mess I did take home. I had to make two trips to haul everything in, and once I had it all in my basement and hung up to dry I didn’t feel like going back out again.
I don’t have a use for any of this men’s clothing (except the cotton t-shirts), so it’s all going to Goodwill. Normally, I don’t take anything I can’t use immediately, because then I end up with a house full of stuff sitting idle. But I’ve got a van booked for later in the month, and a Goodwill donations run is part of my plans, so I’ll bag it all up and send it along. Otherwise, most of it was going to end up in a landfill, because once discarded clothing gets wet it gets heavy, and my fellow pickers can’t be bothered with it. Not that I can blame them–I only had to lug tonight’s haul about 150 feet, and that was enough.
I also got a comforter and a duvet cover from that pile, and a set of burgundy sheets that bleed like mad when wet (one white towel is now pink). The comforter might end up as animal bedding, just like the one I got last week, or I may just Goodwill it.
Other small stuff includes a striped cotton scarf and a flip-top water bottle in an excruciatingly ugly shade of ’70s avocado green. I never buy water bottles; not when I live near a college campus and there are so many of them lost or discarded.
I’ve also picked up some bits of lumber, mostly in the form of Ikea bed slats, which are very useful for small projects. But yesterday’s best score were the denim back cushions from a discarded sofa. The couch itself was a wreck, and the seat cushions were grungy and food-stained, but the back cushions were definitely salvageable. I toted them home, unzipped them, dumped the stuffing into trash bags, and threw the denim covers in the washer. They’re now in the dryer, and once I’ve re-stuffed them I’ll use them on the daybed in the living room that serves as my couch.
I scored big on t-shirts, too; enough to wash an entire large load of them.
Tomorrow should be the last big push to finish clearing out, and Monday is trash day, so I’ll go out scavenging again tomorrow, weather be damned.
Oh, and one notable thing: So far this year, I haven’t found any books at all. I used to find a few, here and there, but in the 12 years I’ve been casually scavenging in the neighborhood, I’ve seen books vanish from the students’ leavings. The only books I picked up last year were all from one house–a complete set of the Twilight novels (well-worn) and an equally-complete set of Britannica Great Books (pristine and unread). The whole lot has been sitting in boxes in my back room since I found it, and is slated for next month’s Goodwill drop-off. But that was an unusual haul; dead-tree books now seem to be dead tech to most students. Much as I never liked finding books in the trash, not finding them at all strikes me as much worse.
Leavings from the student buffet.
Today’s student-moveout trash pickings:
Twin-sized turquoise comforter: from the same house where, last week, I got a pillow with the turquoise sham that matches this comforter. I’m going to cut it into sections and bind the edges to make cat beds.
Two bath towels: a slate blue one that’s kind of seedy-looking, and a better one in peach. They’ll go to the Humane Society, where the animals don’t know it’s not the ’90s any more.
Six assorted men’s cotton t-shirts: I always grab cotton t-shirts; if nothing else, they make good painting rags. I tossed them all in the wash without paying much attention to the colors or checking out the graphics, but at least two are black and one is red.
One women’s cotton t-shirt in a dirt-brown color.
A cobalt-blue glass bottle.
A huge plastic lidded Starbucks cup for a cold beverage. What’s the size larger than a Venti? It’s that size.
Rejected: A Barbie-pink fleece bathrobe. It had enough fabric to justify grabbing it, if only to make into cat throws for the shelter, but I honestly despise that color and didn’t want to work with it.
And hey, you know what? I can afford to be a snob about trash because in the coming week there will be so fucking much of it. Plus, my house currently resembles an episode of Hoarders, so I’ve got to declare some sort of limits, however feeble.