Driving with my SO, I spotted a homeless man on a bike, dragging a shopping cart full of recyclables (OK, there was probably a porno mag and some booze in there too) in his left hand, another bag of cans in his right hand grasping the handle bars, a cane dangling from the cart, a bung leg propped up on a pedal, and a good leg propelling the admirable shamble along. It was quite a sight I thought.
Anywho, this got met thinking, what percentage of recycable cans and all are contributated by the homeless? Then I thought, this man has a “carbon foot print” of like… fuck all. He has no home to build or burn gas in, doesn’t drive, doesn’t eat prepackaged food (assuming he eats in our soup kitchens (which for my reputations sake, I do regularly work in)), and spends most of his time picking up my recycling. “Holy shit” I thought, this man is great for the environment!
So that was my brainwave. We should all be homeless for one year in our lives. I have spoken, all depart!
I certainly wouldn’t savour living like that (not in a city, anyway), but yeah, it’s quite sobering really - nearly every time we say ‘I need…’. it’s bullshit.
In grad school, I lived in a high rise and noticed (and participated in) a nifty communal habit: instead of saving your aluminum (beer) cans for recycling, you put them next to the dumpster out back, and one of the many homeless folks in the neighborhood would pick them up! With several hundred people in the building (and there were other buildings too), all with different garbage-taking-out schedules, at any given moment of the day a local bum could drop by the block and get enough to buy a meal, without the indignity of having to get inside the dumpster and root through all the gross crap in there.
Which is so fucking sad.
I wrote a poem once about the men and, occasionally, women, I often saw pulling two and three shopping carts (hooked together like a train) full of bottles & cans down Lowell Street in Oakland. Wish I still had a copy of that poem.
I said something like, Mother Earth loves them for their hard work on her behalf, even if people don’t honor them for it. I said that when they laid down on some green grass in the summertime, it would always be the softest patch; and when they were sweating with all that heavy load, a breeze would come & cool them; and when they passed a treeful of apples, the best one would be right where they could reach it.
I mean really, you bring up a good point. It doesn’t even matter whether the homeless folks are recycling out of economic necessity or not – I’ll bet there’s a slim majority of people in America who do nothing at all towards that end.
There’s a guy in my neighborhood (not homeless, but a shiftless drunk) who goes around every Sunday night taking cans from the recycling bins people put out for the trash Monday. I mean, hell, I don’t care, but wouldn’t it just be easier to get a job? I mean, that’s a lot of work!
We have a recycling place about a half mile down the road, which makes our neighborhood prime dumpster diving territory. There is a steady stream of folks with bags, riding bikes, pulling shopping carts, even using discarded bike “baby trailers” to transport their swag. I’ve even seen a guy who rides a skateboard with a big duffle bag. One problem: they like to ride around after they’ve cashed in and slugged down a couple of malt liquors, making for hazardous driving conditions.
Our dumpsters are visited several times a day. It’s a bit unnerving and a little frightening to have someone pop out at you, 'specially at night or early in the morning.
Yes, living in middle class affluence in a modern society is fun, but horribly wasteful and horrible for the environment. Sometimes I wonder how the world can possibly survive the impact of countries with immense populations like China and India modernizing and consuming resources on the same level the USA does.
My guess is that he likes being able to set his own hours. It’s easy to lose a job if you keep missing work because of drunken binges/hangovers.
Yeah, but getting drunk on Sunday night would have big consequences, as the recycling only goes out on Monday. He has his own house - one assumes it’s paid for and he gets Sociable Security. He’s always asking me for yard work, and the previous residents did pay him to mow, but I can’t imagine how irresponsible you would have to be to let this guy near whirling gas-powered blades. Saying he’s unsteady is something of an understatement.
It’s easy to lose a job if you keep missing work because of drunken binges/hangovers.