There may be, as I’ve written, joy in having a dumpster in front of you house.
But there’s some anxiety, too.
A few nights ago, just before 10 p.m., I heard a telltale metallic BOOM.
The sound could mean only one thing: someone had just thrown something into our dumpster.
I flipped on our outdoor lights, flung open the front door, and saw—nobody. Either my mind was playing tricks on me, or the culprit—the garbage-tosser—had vanished.
As I closed the door, I felt a twinge of madness at my behavior. What was I doing? Why was I being so proprietary about a dumpster?
And not even a dumpster, to put a point on it. I was being proprietary about empty space.
The space, after all, is what we’re paying for. We’re just renting the dumpster; what we have purchased is the right to dump things in it.
So any little thing tossed in by a neighbor gobbles up valuable dumpster space. Space that we could otherwise fill with our useless crap!
Taylor Coe 