 |
www.hopedance.org
|
| <back | home A Nation of Junk Junkies by Dell Franklin As Americans, or perhaps as humans on planet earth, we have a fascination and obsession with junk. We are literally in love with it. Without junk, we have no life, and little to live for — it is possibly more important than books or movies and sometimes friends and relatives. Yes, junk takes priority over almost everything, and makes our world go around. We love to shop for junk. We love to get good deals on junk. We love to walk away with a sly, smug grin after a transaction for some especially coveted and expensive junk, and run to our friends and exclaim: "Boy, did I get a deal on this latest piece of junk. I STOLE IT!" We are very sensitive about our junk. If somebody does not notice our junk, or is not as impressed with it as we are, we feel offended, almost resentful, maybe depressed. Though we adore our newest junk, and walk around in a happy glow after acquiring it, we are baffled when nobody likes or even cares about our junk; and even more disturbing is a person who despises all junk (especially state-of-the-art junk over which owners stand guard like grim sentries) and castigate it for what it really is — junk. My own history of junk, and, worse yet, transporting it around the country, is probably minimal compared to most citizens of this world. Still, from a single junk-moving experience several years back, I am, to this day, suffering from post-traumatic-junk-moving-syndrome. A real nightmare. In the beginning, from 1967 until 1970, I lived a gypsy existence, bumming around the country, moving everything I owned either in a backpack as I hitchhiked, or in a sputtering VW bug. Then I settled in Hermosa Beach and lived in a studio garret from 1970 until 1978, and when I moved into a bigger studio in Manhattan Beach I needed only to borrow a station wagon and move all my junk in one trip. In 1980, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a buddy, and this time I had a station wagon of my own and had accumulated some second-hand furniture, so it took me two trips to move further north to Manhattan Beach. Six years later I moved to the Central Coast and it took a caravan of two pickups and my station wagon to move my junk to a one-bedroom bungalow in Shell Beach. After 2 1/2 years there I had to make several trips over several days with the aid of a friend to move all my junk to Cayucos — my first real ordeal. In Cayucos I lived in a one-bedroom cottage for over four years. Moving my junk four blocks to my next cottage on Pacific Avenue proved to be one of the most brutalizing experiences in my life. It took me a week! I filled up an entire garbage dumpster behind the local market with junk. I was seething and raging at myself for amassing the mountain of junk I had to deal with. I hurled it angrily out the door onto my lawn, cursed it, kicked it, tossed it on my old pickup, muttering to myself like a madman. There was no end to my junk. I had a yard sale and my girl friend laughed at me along with those weekend junk scavangers who shook their heads and motored off, not one of them offering me as much as a dime for my junk! I tried, finally, to give it away, but nobody wanted it. People shrank from my junk as if it were a disease, for it was some of the most worthless, useless, ugly junk I’d ever laid my eyes on. How had I allowed this to happen to me? Five years later, I moved to my current place, and it took two friends and me only a couple of hours to move. I no longer collect junk. I drive by all yard sales with blinders. I buy only what I need. I find myself jettisoning junk and feeling relieved about it. I even find myself refusing to buy things I need, for I’m still shell-shocked from what happened 10 years ago. Recently, I watched people move out of the two residences across the street. They were ‘60s people, meaning ancient, nonoperational motor homes in driveways, used exclusively for storage of junk or occasional guest lodging. There were always a few old VW buses, usually nonoperational, clogging the streets and driveways and yards. One neighbor had a shed, the other, in a two-storey abode, a garage. I anticipated their possessing a lot of junk, but was thoroughly flabbergasted when both parties moved within months of each other. The couple with the garage moved first, began extracting junk and piling it in the driveway, yard and along the street — a literal mountain of junk such as I’ve never observed in my life. They had several yard sales, over which the junk junkies sniffed and bartered, hauling off the better items early, then returning later for freebies. These friendly neighbors tried to give me some of their junk, of course, but I refused to go near the place, just sat and watched the parade go on for days. Every time I thought they’d run out of junk, they managed to extract more and build a new pile and have a new sale. Eventually, the sight of this spectacle caused me to downsize further, especially when the entire family pitched in to load up the biggest moving van rentable, filled it up, and then filled the last VW bus that would be towed to Oregon, where they were going to rent many acres in the wilderness to stash their junk. My other neighbor, a single female artist, took a month to move, and managed to give me a chair, typing paper and a cat. I got off easy. With the help of a huge cadre of friends, she extracted junk from the shed, the house, the motor home and created a pile to rival that of the ex-neighbors, who were replaced by folks with a reasonable amount of state-of-the-art junk. Her yard sale drew the usual junk junkies who came early to haul off the good stuff and then returned later for the freebies, and finally, when she could no longer give any of it away, she paid a real junkman to take the rest to the dump. The moral of this story, and my final contention, is that junk will someday be the end of us. It won’t be the population explosion, global warming, famine, plague, pollution, nuclear war or terrorist attacks that will end our existence — it’ll be all this goddam junk! Where the hell is it going to go? How deep are our landfills? How vast our oceans? Sooner or later we’re all going to be smothered and strangled under a massive slagheap of junk. And if this doesn’t kill us, well, fighting over the junk will. Crime is up because we steal it. Countries hate us because we’ve got too much of it, as well as the most superior junk ever manufactured by man. Divorcees sue, squabble and war over junk. People are jealous or pissed off because the other person has better junk, so it breeds malevolent feelings. Worst of all, a person can’t even die in peace, often, without worrying about how much damage his children are going to wreak upon one another over divvying up the junk. When all is said and done, we are no match for the junk, and when the world is finally rid of humans and animals, and junk prevails, a perturbed and confused God might view the earth as a testimony to the destructive nature and emptiness of junk, as well as man’s pathological desire to possess it, and either laugh or cry at His experiment. Dell Franklin used to write for New Times and is hard at work writing books and cleaning up his clutter <back | top^ |