...trash...

...on finding treasure...

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“I don't talk trash often, but when I do, I go for the jugular.”

-Kobe Bryant-

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Midway through last year I had the pleasure of opening up a ticket from the City of Oakland public works department. Inside of it was an ominous note.

“Your mail was found in a pile of illegally dumped debris. pay the fine!”

I was perturbed. Disturbed. Other words that end with ‘urbed.

I was mainly upset by the language used. A fully lowercase “pay the fine!” exclaimed with an exclamatory point of exclamation. Cute curly letters in blue point ink. A fully lowercase “pay the fine!”.

A fully lowercase “pay the fine!”.

how dare they!

The punchline was the accompanying photograph.

Sepia toned. Confusing.

A huge pile of trash, and there, dangling like a chad off the corner of the image, sat a box addressed to myself. I felt like I was being punked by someone as unfunny as Ashton Kutcher. In this gigantic pile of debris lay a box with my name on it, so the detectives (dicks) that run my fine city’s trash mystery headquarters pinned the crime on me.

pay the fine!

I can fast forward and say that no fine was paid. Endless days of calls went from my finger into a phone number that was never answered until call number last (2:23PM on a Wednesday on ring number seven) gave me an apologetically sheepish bureaucrat (dick) who let me know that “these types of mistakes happen all the time”.

I BET THEY DO!

They cancelled the fine and I was relieved of the debt, but my mind stayed trapped inside a prison of this pile’s construction. My package that had made it into the trash was the very first mastered recording of the very first record I ever made with my very first band. A delightful piece of history forever lost to some hobo thief’s mistaken porch poaching. It doesn’t feel good to lose history, but it was also helpful to remember that one man’s treasure is another man’s stolen mail accompanied by a pissy-toned letter from the public works department of a city covered in total mess.

The Bay Area is equal parts beauty and trash.

Peninsula parks built atop of landfill piles. Recycling centers, street fires, and creative corners of dreck and dross. If you walk the streets of San Francisco you will dodge loafs of human shit (poop). In Oakland our equivalent is the dumps. Dumps of fabric, wire and string. Plastic bottles, bags, and buffalo flavored bird bones. Cans, containers and cups of crap. Dumps of dumped dump-shaped dumpy stuff.

I stare at those dumps and I think I am going to see something more. I imagine who is tossing this trash on the street. I want to see people in these piles. I want to see life in the litter. Reality in my rubbish. We are what we leave behind, I tell myself. But no one I know looks anything like these photos.

I could look at anything and say somebody did this. Or I could just look at anything. The following is a set of photos I found while trash-hunting in my city. Maybe I should have picked it all up. Instead I am here to pay the fine!

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EFFLUVIA

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“Trash has given us an appetite for art.”

-Pauline Kael-

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JETSAM

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“Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.”

-Ray Bradbury-

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RIFFRAFF

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“Genius is full of trash.”

-Herman Melville-

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DETRITUS

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“Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.”

-Benjamin Franklin-

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“We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke-

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…all photos taken on my “telephone” in and around Oakland……special thanks to

Benjamin Setor

and

Sarina

for your help in editing and curating this pile of words and photos…and to the guy who flipped me double birds after mumbling “gerfle gerfle smerg” at me while waving barbed wire…brother…i see you…

…pay the fine!…

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