CAUTION: Wall of Words below the fold. Enter at your own risk.
When you live as close to the bone as you can, you find out what’s essential and what isn’t.
Curiously, unless you just enjoy living in a garbage dump one of the things that turns out to be essential is a way to get rid of garbage.
I don’t actually produce that much garbage, compared to the way it was in my Mr. Suburban Man days. There were times when my 2.5-person family could fill multiple large garbage containers in a single week. Then a nice man came in a complicated truck and took it all away. It was kinda nice.
Now the nice man doesn’t come around any more. It isn’t the problem it would have been back in the ‘burbs, because like I said – there’s not so much garbage. Very little packaging, for one thing, and what there is I burn. But there’s still the occasional can. Veggie cuttings. Egg shells, coffee grounds.
Okay, so the burnable stuff I burn. The organic stuff I can compost, though it’s more work and mess than it’s worth. It’s not like I need it for gardening. Still, it’s worth it to reduce the volume. There’s still building spoil, broken machines, tin cans, dog-fouled blankets not worth cleaning. In a given week it doesn’t average enough to fill a kitchen pail, but it does add up. Over months, it can add up a lot. That stuff normally goes to the landfill, but the landfill is city property and the cops know me. I rarely get a chance to go there.
Nothing stops me from digging a ginormous hole in the ground, out in some obscure space, and filling it with trash. Whatever Gulchendiggensmoothen’s shortcomings when it comes to moving dirt around on the surface, he’s God’s own hole digger. But I resist that for what I hope is the obvious reason. Whose property shall I dig the hole on?
So we come back to barter. J&H, my neighbors for whom I perform all sorts of services, most of them paid, are one of two local neighbors who actually rent a dumpster. Most weeks, they don’t fill it. But some weeks they do, and if you want to make somebody hostile all you need do is fill their dumpster – for which they’re paying – in such a way that they can’t.
Making these people hostile is not any part of my life’s plan.
No problem, though, because like I said they rarely fill the thing. That empty space is their property, and normally a waste of money. Since I trade services with them all the time, the dumpster becomes another service that can be traded. Instead of a source of sneakiness on my part and hostility on theirs, my need to get rid of an occasional plastic bag actually enhances their wealth.
Does that sound like self-serving rationalization? Of course that’s exactly what it is. All commerce is self-serving – that’s why it works. Look, my services are valuable to them and if I slipped an occasional trash bag into their dumpster without asking, they probably wouldn’t say anything. But they wouldn’t like it, and they wouldn’t forget it. Add a brick to the “hostility” side of the scales. If I simply asked them to do me this favor, they’d probably agree. But too many people do me too many favors as it is – that’s not the kind of relationships I’m comfortable with. “Self-serving,” in this case, means I need to keep my neighbors happy even when I need something from them. My neighbors are my customers, and they’re few.
So what can I trade for the privilege I need? Obviously, the same thing I’ve been trading with them all along – my time and labor. Ever since last year’s wild fire scare, J has been nervous about the wood and crap clogging one side of his property. It’s a couple of hundred yards, and last year he paid me to haul away all the old broken juniper wood on that side. I did the job honestly, but there’s dry grass, tumbleweeds, piles of trash he said he’d haul off but never did. He recently asked if I’d consider turning that long space into a dead zone. I looked it over again and decided he didn’t have enough money to make it worth my while.
It would take weeks to do the job right. I’ve got weeks. He’s got a mostly-empty dumpster, to which I need access more than I need money. Trade!
