Well, the phenomenon that may have originated in SF has made it’s way to the Midwest. I can’t BELIEVE what people are willing to take from the side of the road. And considering that I can think of a delapidated reading lamp and discarded door, we usurped and put to decorative use, not only are we in (as Merlin says) a “transitory” existence, but a a species content, nay, empowered by exchanging our junk contagion.

Considering the other option is the grand undertaking of the “Garage Sale” which gives you the phantom feelings of turning a profit, all the while never earning you more than $1.25 an hour for your efforts, I see the practice of frequent shipments to “CurbWill” to be the most efficient AND generous exercise of stewardship.

I find garage sales soul-crushing. I just don’t have the make-up for it.

In the (three maybe?) that we’ve done at our current house, we were visited almost exclusively by people who were more interested in arguing over a nickel (literally) than actually buying anything. It seems like a popular hobby, this Saturday morning dickering. Weird.

Oh, my family has MASTERED the (f)art of Garage Sales. They can turn an utterly devoid and blind set of eyeballs away from the stress, time, and sweat invested to earn a few hundred bucks. They’ve been known to TAKE OFF WORK on Thursday and Friday to prep and run their GS all day Friday/Saturday. Nuts. I tell you, NUTS.

We just pared down, giving away what to them would be UNTOLD fortunes. And considering that Goodwill gives you a receipt that YOU determine the value for the donation, truly, their is no greater feeling than being reminded in April how you did NOT waste time with peddling your crap in your drive way.

In fact…and tangentially….it’s like a Breath Right Nasal Strip for my psychological well-being. Merlin—care to spin-off of that analogy—what other tricks seem to give you free and easy breathing?

Hey, we have this urban recycling here in manhattan too… me and my friends call it the garbage faerie, and almost all my furniture is made from junk.

in fact, i found a cool poster yesterday which I posted on my blog: http://blog.nonlinearmatters.com/art/what-not-to-love-in-this-city/

I guess the economics of it are: the less space you have, with high rent, the less people can afford to KEEP their junk around… so high rent can have some benefits too…

I have an URL for you: http://www.freecycle.org/ - vibrant, local reuse communities, all Internet-mediated. I’ve given away litterboxes and yoga mats and old computers, and picked up linguistics texts and other goodies.

The Boston area has the street-recycling phenomenon as well. A particularly fine version of it works at MIT, where there is a mailing list (reuse) whose sole purpose is to inform the community that you’ve just put something out in the hallway/loading dock/curb and that it’s free for the taking. Things have been known to disappear in a matter of minutes.

Relatedly, I knew it was time to upgrade my grandmother’s computer when better computers were appearing on the street and not immediately whisked away.

My wife and I began “throwing stuff out” when the community group she helps organize held a fundraising yard sale (many of the community groups in Somerville, MA hold yard sale fundraisers and are willing to take just about any junk you want to dump on them; you personally don’t make any money, but you get some of the crap out of your basement). That got rid of the excess furniture and the truly bizarre Christmas gifts people who don’t seem to know us very well (mostly family) had given us over the years. Then we got serious: closets were emptied, drawers were dumped, every single piece of paper collected over the course of two bookish lives was scrutinized, the refrigerator was cleaned …

One day, waist deep in her correspondence, having just finished culling birthday-valentine-get well cards and getting started on letters of teenage angst, my wife looked up and said, “Hey! I’m quitting grad school.”

Once you start throwing away shit, it’s really hard to stop.

On top of my deep loathing of having strangers knock on the door at ungodly o’clock in the morning, I don’t like yard sales because I’ve seen too many people use them as an excuse to never get rid of the stuff they claim (and probably really think) they’re getting rid of. “Oh, I don’t use that anymore; I’ll sell it at the next yard sale…” Once the whatsis has been so designated, it can sit around for months with no inconvenient guilt attached. For that matter, haul it out into the driveway, and if it doesn’t sell, you can bring it back inside and wait another year to sell it at the next, next yard sale.

A good purge, on the other hand, actually makes things go away. My area is too suburban for urban recycling to work, but I’ve never listed anything on freecycle and not had offers within the hour.

[…] Here’s a shoutout to what KC and I used to call the “ghetto mall” when I lived in the Mission District in SF. As you walked down the streets there, people line the streets with blankets covered with assortments of old stuff. I got half my books that way. I’ve always had a theory that many homeless are more literate than the average person because books are some of the only entertainment they can afford. With no electricity, very little money, and lots of time, books are probably the best way to entertain yourself, I imagine. […]

I thought Park Slope, Brooklyn was the official capital of that. I once put a totallly gross smelly stained couch on the curb just until I could go get my car to start stuffing parts in. It was gone before I could drive around the corner.

I live in the mountains now and if you put crap on your curb here someone will hit it with their truck while muttering under their breath about how Godless you are.