A Life Encased in Styrofoam
It feels like I’ve spent the better part of this summer throwing things away. How can two people create so much garbage? In preparing for our move out to Portland, the misses and I made countless trips to the Goodwill, sold half our lot in a garage sale, and spent countless hours filling garbage bins to their fullest capacity. Foolishly, I thought that once we landed in Portland that the garbage days were behind us. But I’m still filling large chunks of time contemplating, strategizing and eventually hauling so much damn garbage. It never stops.

Thursday is garbage day here on Alfred Street and you should see my driveway! It looks ridiculous. Embarrassing really. Luckily the garbage folks come by for pick up real early here. So if I put all the trash out under cover of darkness the night before, then hopefully the neighbors wont notice that my trash production now rivals that of a mid-sized manufacturing company. Being that Thursday is trash day and because of the early morning pick up, Wednesday nights have now become marathon trash preparation events. I spent almost two solid hours toiling away in my garage last night preparing tightly packed cans and a number of 32 gallon garbage sacks for curbside removal. My trash packing skills have become quite extraordinary. I’ve become especially adept at cardboard origami. I take small satisfaction in plying as much cardboard into one small recycling bin as is logistically possible.

Many of the new home purchases have come from internet buying sprees. Every item arrives safely at our door in a solid cardboard box with ample packaging materials for extra comfort. I could have built a small styrofoam fortress on just the materials delivered in the last few days. And let me tell you, all styrofoam is not created equal. Not only does Apple Computers make a solid fucking computer they also make some of the most bad-ass packaging styrofoam that I have ever tried to break and crumble. It’s like concrete. I had to break out a hack-saw to get at that shit. At one point I was covered head-to-toe in a thin layer of clingy styrofoam snow. Styrofoam is just plain evil. At this point in our technological evolution, we really need to come up with a better packaging solution.

I’m probably being way too optimistic, what with the home imprüvo projects on the docket for this weekend, but I think after last night’s trash packing that our garbage production should level off. Oh hell, who am I kidding? It never stops. Never.