I’m sure I’m not the first to tell you: for the last week Eyjafjallajokull the Friendly Icelandic Volcano has been spewing 14-kilometer columns of ash into the air. The ash created clouds that in turn smoked all of Europe’s airplanes right out of the sky.

The skies were blue, not tic-tac-toed with plane-exhaust lines, they were empty, and they were quiet. And I secretly wished it would go on forever, despite the fun and exciting plans it would displace, wished that it would smoke on and on and on until the entire airline industry went out of business.

Imagine wars with no bomber planes! Imagine the skies with no jumbo jets! Imagine all the communities surrounding airports that would finally have peace and quiet! Imagine the reduction in CO2 emissions! Imagine taking three-week-long boat trips in order to get to other continents!

Instead, the flying bans were lifted yesterday and the sky is once again streaked with puffy white lines. I was disappointed. This probably makes me some sort of Luddite.

Then a delightfully apocalyptic article on a website called The Times Online bolstered my end-time reverie with the headline “This is just the beginning, warn scientists.”

Apparently Eyjafjallajokull has a history of, once it gets started spewing smoke, doing so intermittently for several years afterward. Not to mention the way the eruptions have upset the neighboring volcano Katla.

Katla’s eruptions, according to the article, have “a far greater potential for disrupting travel and the climate.” Maybe there is still some small chance that the airplane industry will go down in a ball of volcanic flame, making the whole transition period that will come after the inevitable oil crash that much easier.

So if you live near Eyjafjallajokull, please keep an eye on the local virgin maidens. We can’t afford to have somebody pacifying the mountain with a sacrifice just when nature is so close to accomplishing what decades of activism have failed to achieve.

It happened in a round-about way. This morning we woke up early. “I can’t sleep.” “Me neither. Let’s go to the flea market.” It would have been the first time I had been there before ten. Prime time. But today there was no flea market. The cold has finally driven even the hardcore boothers away.

We walked on, to the grocery store. Even though I’m really excited to try out what I just learned from Hobo Stripper about making a toothbrush out of a small stick, we needed new toothbrushes and bread. The usual Saturday morning errands, preparations for Everything’s Closed Sunday. At the store I eyed the marked down fruits and vegetables and holiday chocolate. “If we get our asses out of bed tonight, we know what will be waiting for us…”

We walk this path often. Maybe four, five times a week. Maybe ten. It’s the way to the grocery stores, to the dumpsters, and to the post office. The sidewalk fringes rows of unpleasant-looking stucco houses. Quick post-war rebuilds, I imagine without knowing for sure.

Every time I walk this path I imagine the houses empty—apocalypse, emergency, plague—windows broken, ivy slowly stretching up the walls. I imagine that one or two of the houses are inhabited, and that the rest have been marked for plundering the building supplies needed elsewhere.

In a small black trash can next to the sidewalk was a wooden cassette rack, filled with cassettes. I walked into the driveway, lifted the lid and pulled it out. Out of habit. Below it was a bag with what I thought was an enormous candle, and some LPs. “There’s a lady looking at you from the window.” Oh. I took the cassette rack and the bag and let the lid fall closed behind me.

There were five Bruce Springsteen cassettes, a Madonna album that I’ll give away, and a Ghost Busters radio play. The rest I could record over. I looked in the bag. Nope, not a candle, but a huge pot-shaped mass of fat. “Sweet! Now I can try out candle making.” I think of the homemakers I’ve been reading about, making soap and candles from fat scrapped from pans and cut from meat. Had this bit been saved out of habit, because that’s what mom and grandma always did, but tossed for lack of an idea of what to do next?

“Did you see the lady’s face?”

“No, just her head.” I wondered how she had felt, seeing me in her driveway, in her trashcan. Perhaps she had felt annoyed, possessive. Maybe she was kicking herself for not getting that table at the flea market after all.

Later, I walked across the street to use the toilet. (The water in our bathroom wagon has been turned off for over a month. At first because several pipes froze and exploded, now because we don’t want them to explode again. “Little business” as the Germans euphemize peeing happens outside and “big business” across the street.) On the way back I cut through the trash collection corral. Holy shit. There was a big pile of blankets, witty little shirts in my size, unprinted shirts that I will screen print and sell, two fitted sheets (for the longest time we only had one and now we are teetering on exuberance), a fall jacket, and a sweet black velor jacket that has The Mad Scientist’s name written all over it. All piled dejected on the pavement. I boxed them up and took them home.

Last week someone threw out another kitchen, spices still full, leftovers from the previous night’s dinner still clinging to pan bottoms. I had just written a grocery list for the three-course dinner I made on Saturday night. I wasn’t sure where I was going to find algae flakes, but there was the obvious answer: in the dumpster across the street is where you’ll find them (as well as two bags of beans, rice paper, baking powder, and pudding mix).

But the winner of this week’s most curious find was the bag of dried lilies. What do you even do with dried lilies? Usually I complain when I find flowers in the trash. (Although they came in handy for the bridal bouquet.) “You can’t eat flowers!” I bitterly tell anyone who tries to tell me that at least they’re pretty. And now dried lily petals among the remnants of someone’s kitchen cabinets. I guess you can eat flowers after all.

You just never know what you might find. It’s like trying to guess the name of a gnome who weaves straw into gold just for you. Guess from here to kingdom come, you’ll never guess ‘Rumpelstiltskin.’ Only by sneaking up in the dead of night will you know the correct answer is, ‘three wool sweaters and a portable pet cage.’ Dumpster diving is outrageously unpredictable. You have to do it to believe it.
-John Hoffman, The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving

I started dumpster diving for food in college. And I became addicted. To the rush. To the material benefits. Dumpster diving involves sneaking, climbing, running, and exploring. It can be exhilarating, so different than the docile student’s life I led during the day from behind a computer or a desk. The city started to feel like a playground, my life a game in which I could play at being a pirate, on the search for buried treasure. And there was treasure everywhere.

It is what the Situationalists would have called inverting the everyday, and what I call dumpster magic. The act of taking something out of the trash transforms the object’s meaning. Every product passes through a cycle of meaning before reaching its end in the trash. Produce starts out as a pile of seeds and passes through various stages (which humans assign various stages of meaning and monetary value)—seedling, plant, crops, and finally, vegetables. Once in the grocery store vegetables become products with ISBNs and a price tag to tell us it’s worth. Taken home this object may then become part of a regular lunch, or perhaps even a special birthday feast or gift. Unsold vegetables are thrown away, rendering them trash, rendering them worthless.

Through this whole process, we remain open to the fluidity of meaning and worth (seeds being economically worth less than plants, plants and harvested vegetables being worth less than value added products like jam or wine), but the “trash” stage is the point at which this fluctuation of meaning halts, despite the fact that items in the dumpster may be physically identical to items previously labeled as groceries and assigned a dollar value. Once trash, things pass into the material dead, so to say, and may never return. This is, at least, what we are taught.

When we break this taboo by dumpster diving we call these objects back from the dead, giving them a new life and assigning new meaning and emotional value. Trash becomes food, energy, and life. Baguettes are revived as food, and then, in the perverse excesses we often dumpstered them when I was in college, swords for play fights, food for pets, and fodder for the compost.

Trying to understand how it was that a $25 sweater in a high-end resale shop could be had for twenty-five cents at the Goodwill store across town, how it was that last year’s $40 pair of jeans could sell six months later in the thrift store for $1.40, I began to realize something: price tags aside, these sweaters and jeans carried no inherent value. Their value was a shifting process, as much a matter of their context as their content–and even more interesting, the process didn’t move in a straight line. The object was originally of great monetary and emotional worth might later be discarded or given away as “worthless,” only to reappear in a charity store with a small fraction of its worth restored–and discovered there, might well find all its lost grandeur restored, and more, if now reimagined by someone as a ‘collectible’ or ‘antique.’ Sweaters, tea sets, toasters–they seem solid enough, but their meaning remains malleable.
-Jeff Ferrell, Empire of Scrounge

Objects thrown away, rendered useless, dead, might become a valued treasure in the hands of a collector, or a scavenger who has just chanced upon the exact thing that she needs for a project or her basic survival. A trashed sweater may be revived in its original name and purpose or it might be revived as a bed for a dog or cat, re-sewn into a skirt or a curtain or a pillow, unraveled and re-knit or used to tie things together, or wipe up a spill. You wouldn’t buy a sweater and use it for anything but a sweater. But, really, why the hell not? Because of the monetary values assigned to various objects by the economy. It’s kind of strange and stilted when you get to thinking about it.

The trashing of an object, in this way, seems to free us of its pre-assigned intention because it frees the object from its monetary value and economic meaning. If you buy a desk at the store you are not only buying a construction of wood and screws and drawers, but buying the concept “desk”—an object that you will place in your workspace and write letters on—and buying into its assigned worth. These assigned values create boundaries that limit our imaginations. You would pay 100 dollars for a desk, but would not pay 100 dollars for a desk-sized portion of firewood, so you do not dare to re-imagine the desk as firewood because this does not make sense within the order of the economy. If a door costs 100 dollars and wood for your wall costs 30 dollars, you’re going to buy the wood for your wall. But freed of a monetary meaning, found on a pile of trash and taken home, you might use the door as part of a shed wall, a roof, or as firewood.

This concept follows us everywhere—into a whole cultural tendency to label and categorize and refuse to accept alternative definitions for commonly accepted items. A couch is for sitting on. It is not for dirty shoes, or dogs, and it is certainly not for drawing on. Yet the garden of the squatted house where I live is filled with couches that we have pulled out of the trash. Dogs and feet are welcome on them. People draw on them. People break them apart and build them into other things, fasten them onto bikes. The trash, having freed these objects of monetary worth (I worked hard to buy that couch (and that concept of couch) so get your dirty feet on the floor where they belong…) leave us freed of these categorizations, free to re-imagine objects and redefine them, limited only by our own imaginations and ambitions.

In this disposable culture, among these abitrary concepts of value most everything is rendered worthless. Everything is worthless, and we are surrounded by endless piles of worthless objects. The others publish books with advice about de-cluttering our homes and living “simply:” more objects that will ultimately be stripped of all value and meaning. A certain brand name tag on a shirt or a pair of pants might translate to a higher acceptable monetary value, but out of the store, as seasons, in the fashion sense, come and go, it quickly loses this monetary value until it finally is laid to rest among the dead, the trash. Tragically this culturally acceptable monetary value tends to have little to do with the objects real value—what is the value of the tree cut down to make the paper for a book? What is the value of clean air, whose pollution we pay for by paying for things made in smoke spewing factories? What is the value of the hair shorn from the sheep and spun into the wool that made that sweater? An objects monetary value has little to do with these questions. Especially in the case of government-subsidized industries.

I have my own ritual for assigning objects worth and it has nothing to do with where the object came from (though I admit I tend to value items I got out of a good trash picking adventure most of all). The sterility of store bought items bores me, so I take the time to alter most everything that comes through my hands, thus instilling each object with a highly personal value. Besides, seeing a shirt re-imagined as a curtain or a couch re-invented as a bike-seat gives me a thrill, as if I’m looking through a window at the apocalypse.

This is sort of weird and personal, but it gives me a rush to see commercial bric-a-brac in a down and dirty survival context. For example, when I see cardboard shacks in the Mexican colonias, I always feel a little rush when I see the words ‘Pringles,’ or ‘THIS SIDE UP,’ or ‘IBM.’ It’s so…post-apocalyptic. So that shelving unit in the chicken coop always gave me a small charge, and I get a rush from burning wood crates with produce trademarks stamped on the ends.

You see, commercial products are constantly hyped, creating little ‘recognition centers’ in our heads. So, when you walk down a busy street or store aisle familiar products seem to leap at you screaming, ‘Buy me!’ But seeing the product in a compost-splattered ‘no bull’ context is like mental anti-toxin. You see the product leap out at you and think, ‘Our hogs like that!’ You begin to feel layer upon layer of artificiality stripped away as you peer in dumpsters and use what you find.
-John Hoffman, The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving

Tuesday December 08th 2009, 7:36 am 3 Comments
Filed under: apocalypse now,conspiracies,dumpster diving,freegan

I have spent the last two days working on my book. It is ironic that writing and writers are so often romanticized. “What a fantastic life he must lead,” people think. “He’s a writer.”

But watching someone write a book is probably one of the most boring spectacles there is. And writing? Writing is sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day, not talking to anyone, interacting only with the glowing screen. I wouldn’t trade it for any other occupation, but I’m not going to lie to you about it either. The process of writing is really only interesting for the writer.

When I am writing, I am no longer with you in the room. I do not hear the television or the music playing in my headphones (though having the music playing at all is part of my ritual for entering the writing trance). I am in the story.

When I am excited about something, can’t wait for the day when it will finally happen, I write out the scenario as I imagine it, tens of, hundreds of times in my notebook. Because every time I write it I am there, living it.

Virtual reality and time travel were invented when the first word was written.

My manuscript is getting fat—53 pages fat to be exact. But the structure is chaotic, still a direct reflection of my garbled thoughts. I have only ever been capable of organizing my thoughts through writing. So first comes the babble, then the order. At the end of it all I find that I have finally learned how to say what I was thinking, to translate the brain babble into English.

My computer screen is too small to fix lengthy structural problems. At most I can see three paragraphs at a time. So I printed out pages one through 16 and taped them all to the bookshelf behind my desk, making large notes in the margins about what was happening in each section so I could look at the bigger picture, making notes about where to move things that were still incubating in paragraphs set off with bolded question marks.

It was then that I played “dead flag blues” (a godspeed! you black emperor song) and stared at the pages, fluttering there against all those bound volumes.

I imagined them burning, edges curling in on themselves in yellow and orange.

I have dedicated myself to sterility, to nonfiction. (It was an accident, officer, I swear!) Yet my heart beats in these lines, and the louder it gets, the closer I will be to finishing.

I hear it is national novel writing month. A little bird told me.

The new year has sprung, and with it, winter. There is snow on the ground, and I smell like burning wood, like wood stove, like warm winter nights curled up under three down blankets with a pile of books.

As I ball up pieces of newspaper to start the fire again, random headlines catch my eye. Why 2008 Was a Great Year. Money Troubles in the NPD. Low Stock Prices Expected to Continue Into 2009. Somalian Pirates Arrested. Neo-Nazi Tried for Attack on Leftist Summer Camp. Germany Prepares for Climate Change. Seven Hundred Palestinians Dead.

War, tragedy, death, corruption, (finance) crisis, violence, theft. I put it all in the oven, light a match, watch it all burn, and smile.

The war has started. On the way to the supermarket, a firing-squad worth of shots ringing through the air, then, laughter. New Year’s Eve on our doorstep, and not a teenager without a handful of explosives.

Last year, I spent New Year’s Eve right in the heart of the battle. A night of poker and whiskey, then out into the Frankfurt night to giggle and drunkenly throw fireworks into the street (and at cars, and our friends). This year we have decided to flee to the south, where we will remain in hiding until the battle is over, the piles of red paper cartridges all swept up, the fireworks packed away safely for next year.

New Year’s tends to get me feeling apocalyptic. Ever since that mess in ’99, I guess, when everyone thought the world would end (or that at least all the computers would crash, which for a lot of people is the same thing) and my friend’s moms were stockpiling bottled water and canned food. When we all woke up to a completely normal 2000, feeling a bit silly about having believed it, even just a little bit, and fanatics tried to drum up suspense for the following year with the cry of: „The new milenium technically doesn’t start until 2001!“ But really, New Year’s Eve just hasn’t been as exciting since.

So, for this new year, I present you a new set of apocalyptic musings. It all started with wood. Just like every morning, afternoon, and evening, if I want to be warm, starts with wood. Getting the wood. (“Did we order enough for the whole winter?” “Does that stuff behind the kitchen belong to anyone?” “I saw a dumpster full of leftover wood today, want to go pick it up later?”) Chopping the wood. (They say that you are not a true Bauwägler until you have done two things: Drunkenly tripped over the wagon drawbar and hacked your hand with the axe while, also drunk, trying to chop wood in the middle of the night. Of course if you manage not to suffocate yourself with carbon monoxide the first night sleeping with the wood stove on, you get a few bonus points.) And, finally, coaxing the wood into flames. (“The fucking oven went out again!” “The wood is too wet!” “There’s fucking smoke everywhere!”)

Luckily, there’s wood everywhere, and you don’t even have to cut down any extra trees to get it because the ever-dependable excesses of capitalism makes sure that there is free, burnable material being thrown out all the time. There is newspaper in the recycling bin to get things started. There are thin wooden boxes behind the grocery store and at the farmer’s market for kindling. And there is construction site after construction site with container after container full of wood that they are going to have to pay to throw away. If all that stuff is going to get torched at the dump anyway, you might as well torch it in your cute little wood stove and make a warm winter night of it.

(I used to work to pay for heat. Hahahahaha. Now I just stay home and play with power tools and fire instead.)

Some people say, “Yeah, well, you’re putting a lot of Co2 into the atmosphere, heating with wood.” To which I have a sack full of retorts. But what’s the use? I do what I do because it feels right, not because it’s the all-seeing, all-powerful Righteous Answer to Everything. Our friendly neighbors (office workers who spend their smoking breaks cackling at us from the student center’s balcony) complain that the wood-stove smoke bothers them. It’s unsightly, and it smells. I say take a trip to the power plant supplying your home’s power and take a look at all the black, soul-less columns of reeking smoke your electricity puts into the air. Just because you don’t have to see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In fact, maybe it would be better if everyone did have to see it, because then maybe we would all be a little more concerned with the consequences of our standard of living.

There is no clean electricity, no electricity that is truly environmentally friendly, not really. (Hear me out, bike-generator owners and solar-panel lovers.) Most people think of, to take a common example, solar energy as being pretty clean. And I reckon it is cleaner than coal and nuclear. But consider this: How was the glass in the panel made? How was the metal holding the panels together made? Where did the metal come from? How was the metal taken from the ground? Processed? Transported to the solar-panel-making factory? How did the people who designed and built the solar panels get to work? Did any part of this process involve large machines? (Machines that were also made out of metal, that needed to be taken out of the ground by other machines, and more people who had to get to work somehow.) Did any of this involve oil? Or plastic? (In which case it did involve oil.) Did it involve electricity manufactured, not by happy hippy solar panels, but by the power plant down by the mines, the same ones spewing black muck into the sky (or leaving uncountable years of radioactive waste in its wake)?

The same questions could apply to „oil-less“ cars, energy-saver light bulbs, and those little stickers that cheerfully remind us to turn out the lights when we leave a room. Buying solar, buying hydro, powering your car with vegetable oil, none of this is going to make much of an environmental difference. These are phantom solutions; solutions that lead us to believe we’ve done our part when what we’ve really done is bought another heap of plastic and metal that will eventually need to be replaced by another, all of which will require mind-boggling amounts of pollution to manufacture.

What could help is never making another car. What could help is never making another straw or paper napkin or plastic bag (seriously, what the fuck? PURE, INSTANT WASTE). Recycling bottles isn’t going to help, recycling paper isn’t going to help, recycling plastic isn’t going to help. What could help is never making another bottle or can or not printing millions and millions of newspapers daily. Heating with wood won’t help, powering your computer with solar won’t help, living off the grid probably won’t even help (though it does wonders for your sanity, tell you what). What could help is having no electricity, no computers, no light bulbs.What could help is a much smaller ppopulation with a very, very different lifestyle. If we wanted to „save“ the planet, that is. And by „save“ I mean, „keep pleasant for human life.“ Because the planet doesn’t need us to save it. The planet probably doesn’t give a shit if the polar caps melt and the world becomes a desert or if another ice age is approaching. We’re the ones who give a shit about all that, because we’re the ones who need things like ozone and potable water to survive. The earth would probably be better off without us.

I’m not saying not to recycle or use solar energy or to leave the lights on when you leave the house (I say, do whatever your conscience tells you is responsible), and I’m not saying this to make anyone feel bad (though it all happens to make me feel terrible), but don’t fall prey to the belief that remembering to turn out the lights or recycling paper makes any of us environmental saints. The best thing you could possibly do with books like 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth is to use them to light your wood stove.

If the environmentalists are right, there are probably no small changes that could stop the polar caps from melting or the ozone from slowly disappearing, or cultural changes that could stop timber corporations from clear cutting forests and factories in China from making cheap, plastic shit. Seems that radical change is in order, and it seems like that’s just not going to happen.

I reckon that the change, this apocalyptic end that environmentalists whisper about, the revolution that radicals plan and pray for in secret meetings, the economic crash that has the bankers wringing their hands, I reckon it’s probably going to be forced on us all one way or another as our own system and environment buckle under the pressure of myths like the American dream, and come crashing down around us, long before we’ve tried to change, and whether we remembered to turn off the light in the living room or not. Hopefully, by then, we’ll all have already learned how to grow vegetables and skin deer.

So ends my yearly dose of apocalyptic musings. This is our final broadcast for 2008, cut, end transmission, see you in January.
Yours for the apocalypse,
Click Clack Gorilla