My Day At The Recycling Facility

Because I'm moving that's meant a total cleaning job on the house, getting rid of all the things that we don't need (some of them) and certainly getting rid of things that are broken, not working, or are simply at this point garbage.

I didn't really know that just anyone could go out to the recycling facility and throw away tons of stuff with impunity. I guess I thought there were more restrictions on throwing away things, meaning that I had accumulated quite a few unusable or junky things.

I got a laptop computer now, which meant my office computer and my home computer were set aside. Then this week I took the hard drives out of those, making them totally worthless to me. Because I didn't want to move them and their big huge monitors and the whole works.

I had a couple of printers to get rid of, an old Macintosh computer from the '80s, record players, 8 track tape players, scanners, etc. Notice everything I listed (and some things I didn't list) are in the plural. That's true. I had a bunch of stuff. Then there was the tangle of various cords, plug-ins, power adapters, the whole bit. Keyboards, mice, amplifiers, and even my XM radio, including the home station and the car adapter stuff.

Another guy was helping me and we showed up with five or six loads, pickup truck loads, of all this junk. Once weighed in we went in the garage and just flung it on the floor of the place. It was kind of fun just flinging, throwing, shoving, kicking off the truck, and so forth.

My favorite trip was when we had all the electronics, which were sorted out. With that trip we took the metal objects too, an old patio table, a 70 pound typewriter, and I can't remember what all. We flung that into the metal receptacle, then went into the garage to fling the electronics. I threw down the computers, then I'm landing amplifiers on them, the scanners are smashed to bits when they hit the floor, it was a total travesty of brokenness and waste.

I thought back to when I got some of the stuff. One of the amplifiers I got in 1975! The Macintosh computer originally belonged to my late father. There it went, unceremoniously flung to the cement floor. My computers were there, on their side, with the amplifier crunching in the side as it landed on it. It was the wildest scene I've ever seen when it comes to garbage. I didn't know you could do that. It was amazing to see one of the scanners shatter into several pieces. Wow, those things aren't build to withstand a tumble!

I said it was fun, but only the unloading, and even then I would've rather been at home taking it easy. By the end of the day I was beat ... and could barely kick off the stuff. The very last item was a withered copy of a paperback book by S.J. Perelman, "Acres and Pains." Which I almost kept when it came right down to it, but it was old and falling apart. I like the writings by him that I've read. One of them one time I laughed over till I cried, so I know he can be very good.

What a day! A smashing good time!

Plus it was fun watching the garbage trucks rolling in, emptying garbage, pure and simple garbage. It'd be fun to spend some time out there with a video camera, just getting some great footage on this stuff.