The Trash Can is America's Closet

You never find out how much trash, junk, and garbage you have until you move. Magazines, gum wrappers, receipts, random pieces of wood, clothes you haven't worn in ages, boxes full of tax documents and schoolwork you refuse to throw out (like anyone, yourself included, will ever again read an essay on Hegel's definition of "aesthetics" or the book review of "Ramona Quimby" you wrote in the third grade). Sheets of bubble wrap, socks with holes in the heel and toe, books you've yet to read, CD's you never listen to, photographs of people you never want to see again, a rapidly-growing obsolescent VHS copy of "True Lies," greeting cards from Christmas 1999, gifts you opened, smiled at, and quickly stuffed in the corner of your room, only to resurface again the next time you move, making you question why you have so much stuff.

It's a vicious cycle of pack-ratism. And it doesn't end. Because when you die, your children will inherit your trash and preserve it in your memory. Your son will inherit your valued collection of incomplete Nepalese domino sets and your daughter will hold the wilted banana peel that evidences your last meal while she weeps into a kleenex you used when you were 13.

Americans love their trash. We love making it. We love saving it. We love eating it (case in point: Grade D hot dogs made from animal parts that should have been discarded). Our blood is practically the liquid in the bottom of the trash can. That's how biological our love of trash is.

But the fact that we cling to trash as tenaciously as a gibbon on a vine is the obverse effect of us being wasteful. We've been told for so long to "clean your plate" because there are starving children in Uganda and "you should only be so lucky to have a television" that when it comes to throwing things away, we feel guilty! Saving things we don't need helps us cope with wasting food, resources, and privilege. Whenever you throw out an old vacuum, an old pair of glasses, or a water gun there's a moment's hesitation, and in that moment you feel guilty. Because somewhere out there exists a person who needs a vacuum, who can't read because glasses are beyond his means, who is really hot but doesn't have a water gun to soak himself with.

Of course, we're not the only ones who save trash. But we are a cluttered nation. And spoiled with space. We see empty space as space that needs to be filled. Vacancy makes us nervous. Sometimes it seems as though we make trash simply for the sake of creating having something to look at! When modern art teaches us that filth, vileness, vulgarity, and chaos can be beautiful, it's no surprise when trash becomes art.

We love clutter. We love our stuff. We love having so many possessions we don't have time to use them all. The consumerist syndrome is standing under the neon lights of the store, some useless Wal-Martian artifact in our hands, and saying, "Oh, I'll make time to use this plunger slash George Foreman deep fat frier. I'll use it all the time!" But we never do. We clean our toilets and make sweet potato fries once, and then back into the box it goes until Christmas, where we put a ribbon on it and pawn it off on our least favorite relative . Either that or we leave it in the garage until it's actually an antique in mint condition. Then we sell it on eBay, the center of trash consumerism. You can actually buy worn, tattered sneakers on eBay! eBay is not so much an online mercado as it is a sociological experiment to see how many times, and for how much commerce, trash can change hands.

In retrospect, I probably should just throw out the hideous figurine of a cougar pouncing on a deer that my mother gave me for Christmas. But I can't. There's a little boy in Kazakhstan without such a figurine. He's written to Santa for the past three years asking for this figurine. And because this little boy wants it so badly, I'd have to be inhuman to throw the figurine away. So I'll keep it, stowed away in the dark confines of a box, where it will never see the light of day. But it will be there.