On the Can (Part Deux)

Saturday afternoon was spent in my garage sorting bottles and then with Pablo at the recycling place (a big semi-truck in a parking lot in the ghetto, really).   My garage was completely over-run by green trash bags.  So much so that you really couldn’t walk in there once you opened the door.  It sort of looked like a scene from that awesome train-wreck of a show “Hoarders.”  Only this stuff was actually worth something.  Not much, but something.

I decided I was going to finally return them because I haven’t blogged in awhile and I needed something to say.  Telling you how much I made from recyclables is news, right?  In my world it is.  ‘Cause there’s not much going on around here.

As I started the sorting process, I realized I really should have gotten myself some plastic gloves.  If you trash dive for bottles at your job and then put them in bags and forget about them in the garage A) critters eat through the bags looking for the sweet sticky remnants of soda and B) that soda is sticky as hell and sometimes moldy.

One thing I will NEVER do again is dump the recycling bin from outside of work into a bag and take it home.  It’s supposed to be for bottles and cans, but people throw their empty starbucks Frappuccinos in there along with their sandwich containers and half-full Naked juice with no lid.  The stench is strong enough to travel back through time and punch that guy who made fun of you in high school.  I mean, really eye-watering, I just-found-this-dead-raccoon-in-my-garage-and-it’s-been-there-for-weeks  kind of bad.   I considered just taking it to the side of the road and leaving it there for an ambitious homeless person but after I had already touched the slime, I figured it was too late now.

 

Sweeney came out, baby on hip, to see how I was fairing and I waved him away.  “I don’t want her to see my like this. You guys get back in the house!” By “like this,” of course, I meant surrounded by other people’s trash and covered in black mold.  If I’d ever been embarrassed in front of my husband…well…at that moment, I came pretty close.  As he walked away he mumbled, “I’d like to think this isn’t going to happen again…but…”

The truth is, it probably will happen again.  It’s  bit like giving birth:  You curse and swear at the flies circling your head and the mold spores threatening to permeate your perfectly good lungs, but when you get that cash in your hand and walk away from Pablo, the elation takes over and the pain is forgotten.  Until six months later when you’re kneeling in the garage again, feeling like a junkie looking for a hit.

 

(Not actual car.)
I was guessing I had $32.00 in recycling.  Pablo gave me $40.35.

If you just found forty bucks on the street, wouldn’t you be excited about that?  And yes, it was four months of mostly digging bottles out of the trash at work, but only two people saw me.  So it’s almost like it never happened…and I’m forty bucks the richer.