Scavengers

White two-person couch for sale. It has seen considerable wear but is still perfectly acceptable by college apartment standards...

I look over the listing for probably the fifth or sixth time. Its a sick part of me that really needs to to prove that I'm a different sort of moron from the other morons on craigslist. I'm the sort who can spell all the words describing precisely what item of trash I am overcharging you for.

I hit send and copy the ad to facebook. One down. All thats left now is the dresser, bookshelves, table, pots, pans, blender, cooking knives, desk, bed...

An IM window pops up, and the same conversation plays out again,

Friend: you're selling all your stuff?
Pika: Yeah, I'll lose less money if I just sell it all than if I pay first to store it then to ship it
Friend: Where are you going?
Pika: back to my old job for 3 months
Friend: and after that?
Pika: not sure

Its an odd feeling to walk around your home, take stock of your possessions, and try to determine which are worth carrying with you onto a plane, and what the rest is worth.

"Its just, when you buy furniture you tell yourself 'That's it. That's the last sofa I'm gonna need, whatever else happens, I've got that sofa problem handled.'"

I'm pretty ashamed to be nervous, and I'm pretty ashamed to have any sort of attachment these material possessions in that I am a little sad to see them go.

Its the next day now. Three men are standing around the white ratty old couch, considering it. I find their presence bizarre. I did not expect this to actually work.

"That's a pretty nice dresser," a different voice says at a different time today. This one belongs to a young woman standing in my home in denim shorts and flip flops with a friend. She's making light condescending conversation between noisy chomps on her bubble gum. I can tell she doesn't care much, she has already evaluated the beaten up T-shirt and shorts I'm wearing as PJs, my lack of makeup, and the fact that my room is strewn with computer guts, and decided I'm not really very worthwhile as a person.

They had already loudly informed me they attended the local liberal arts school. A lot of kids here do that, as if this will excuse them if they say something stupid later.

"So you went up the hill?" she asks, pointing at the wall of the room nearest to my former university.

"Yeah"

"What did you study?"

I stand there a split second with a momentary brain jam. What sounds light, and makes easy conversation?

"Computer Science. What do you guys study?"

"Oh," the girls giggle and look at each other, then inform me again that they attend the local liberal arts school. I wasn't previously aware that precluded having a major. There is a pause before the girl with the gum pointed to my dresser.

"Where did you get it?"

I consider for a moment trying to explain snapping my cell phone shut in the warm sunlight as I sat on top of this dresser on some city side road. The free sign formerly attached to the dresser was in my hands and my feet bare swung over the edge in the summer breeze, making little thunk thunk noises as they bounced against the wood which made up the back. I put my cell phone back in my pocket and just lay there on top of the dresser on the sidewalk enjoying the sunshine until my friends came to help me move it. I wonder if the sight of a grown woman doing that amused passers by.

I had originally planned to strip the ugly white paint off it and re-stain the exterior. The inside of the shelves showed the piece was made of nice quality wood that somebody had covered over in a bad paint job. However, the paint job was botched enough that removing it would make it look funny and I resigned to sell it for something less than the original target of $150 because of that.

Where did you get it?

The girl's bubblegum clicks loudly and I snap back to reality.

"Around," I shrugged. It doesn't matter that my answer doesn't make sense because the girl did not honestly care what I had to say. This is the art of small talk. You should hear some of the absurd things I say when people's minds go on autopilot and try to have these idle meaningless chats with me. God knows they never do. The girl just hands me my money and walks off with her new furniture.

I look at the 20's in my wallet and I wonder how far this money will go toward re-buying new replacement belongings when the time comes for me to have them again. I realize I have no grasp for what my belongings are actually worth. I know what replacement ones cost new in a store, I know what competitors would sell the items I sold for, and I have a pretty good estimation of what people will pay for them, but I have no real grasp to their actual value. This is because I took them from a curb where they had no value. My discussions with buyers have given the items a potential value. Sometimes the illusion is strong enough for money to change hands. If, instead of having a discussion, I was to put them back on the street they would have no value again.

I took one microeconomics course in college. I should have taken more. I remember being taught that items are worth precisely whatever people will pay for them but it had never previously struck me quite on this level.

I wander around my home. When was the last time I bought something? I got a laptop for 200 dollars in December. I paid money to get a desk, a table and some cooking supplies the April prior to that.

For the past few years I have lived a very simple life in the anxious anticipation of a real job which would afford me new clothes (which are the one thing I have not mastered salvaging) and the privilege of turning the thermostat as high as I dared in the winter. I cook most of my food from scratch on a rotating meal plan with some friends. The time spent making meals on your night from scratch is offset by not having to cook more than 1/3rd of the time. We make most things ourselves when we need them: shelves, desks, whatever.

I live a very comfortable life. My house is full of belongings. All of them are scavenged from the streets or dumpsters. Nobody can tell, as a matter of fact I did not realize I was living almost purely off of other people's trash until today. Sometimes I polish it up and sell it, and sometimes I live using the object for a few years before I sell it.

I realize now that I never realized how good I had it, that I enjoy this lifestyle, and that if I had paid a little more attention to things here and there that I could have easily lived with both of those things which I wished for and lacked.

There's an email in my inbox from a news reporter who met Magpie and me at a swapmeet where Magpie was selling some very high power RF equipment scraps. He pulled them with some friends from an item they bought on craigslist. If they sell a single piece of the item it will cover the cost he bought the whole thing and leave us lots of scrap to, in the worst case play with, and in the best case sell as well. He already has interested buyers for two chunks. The reporter is fascinated.

The fact of the matter is, I live a very good quality of life due to other people's trash, both using it and making a profit off it.

I walk up to the edge of Magpie's room, head full of thoughts, rounding the corner lean against the doorjam. Magpie is happily typing away at his keyboard on a large home-made desk which covers much of that corner of the room. He faces three identical LCD monitors which he does his work on: all of them taken from dumpsters with bad power supplies and repaired. A fourth monitor which was unrepairable hangs from his ceiling facing down as a work lamp. If there is anybody who epitomizes this lifestyle, it would be him. Magpie bought his car off craigslist for a very small sum. We spend long weekends wandering the junk yard pulling out scraps to bring home. You can call us nuts, you can tell us that our time is worth money and we're not actually saving anything, but I am not sure I will believe it anymore. For one thing all of us work on salary. Secondly, I'm pretty sure that if we were not living like this we'd be buying stupid expensive gizmos to play with and clogging our homes with them instead of ripping things from the trash and making them useful.

Its hard to explain how I live. I guess Atom summed it up best when he called us "The Techno-Amish." Instead of getting together for a barn-raising, notes go out over the IRC channel for an event to replace Ginger's brake lines. We carpool up to the swap meets, many people split the costs of projects. This life would be nearly impossible to live this life outside a community such as this.

My mind flickers back to the image of the girl in the flip flops and the bubble gum before she left with her new belongings. Chomp.

"The shelf is light. I'm not big and the third floor apartment..."

"My new apartment is on the 3rd floor too!"

Sometimes I feel like I don't even know how to hold a conversation anymore.

There is a slight pause before she says, "You planned pretty far ahead when you bought this stuff I guess then."

I smile politely.

A week later I'm hauling down the freeway riding shotgun in a 10 foot UHAUL with the California sun on my face.

Tha-bump.

The UHAUL bounces over a pothole and everything in the back shifts. Among other things it contains four couches, a desk, and a dresser.

"Not a bad haul," I say, looking at the driver.

Supplies grins, mindful of the steering wheel in his hands.

My phone lights up with a text from Pacem, "Pika, you're a star. I'm buying you drinks."

In the first day we got that load and a second load which contained a leather couch, two tables, five chairs (three leather), a small end table, and a nice footrest that matched the couch and the chairs. All it cost was the 130 dollars it cost to rent the UHAUL. Saturday we plan to go out again, after all, we do have to furnish four houses for free.

Really though, not a bad haul at all.