Blame It All On My Roots

Biting into the future by curb-shopping the past

The scavenged shelf making its way indoors to the garage

I garbage-picked a shelf tonight.  It was the first time in years I’ve seen something on the curb and actually decided to bring it home.

I didn’t make a spectacle of myself – I saw it on my walk, not long before sundown, and I was on a tight schedule, because I had to make it to Costco before 6.  I promised myself I’d hit there, and the grocery store, and if the shelf was still there when I finished my errands, it was meant to be mine.

It's not a super practical shelf, more useful as a store display than as heavy-duty storage, but I envisioned it in an underutilized nook of the War Room.  It was in front of this little clothing boutique on Monroe Street, a place that’s actually gotten me thinking about limited retail again – they sell online, but you come to the store at specified times to pick up your order.  I’ll likely never take that plunge again, but I love that people are thinking up ways to make retail feasible for them that don’t involve sitting in an empty store on a Wednesday afternoon watching cars go by.

I made my Costco run, embarrassing myself slightly by not knowing how to use the new card scanners up front [side note: when did showing your membership card at Costco become tyranny in the eyes of the loudest, dumbest people in town?  I thought it was sort of a badge of honor, a little VIP thing, but people are acting like they’re being asked for a stool sample.  Calm the hell down.  If you’re that bothered, Walmart’s right down the street and it’s free].

I hadn’t realized until I was leaving the house that I’d written a blizzard list – buying extra coffee, beer, snacks and some provisions.  It hit me that I was planning for… what?  For a nationwide repeat of January 6?  For “isolated civil unrest”?  For just not wanting to drive past any random hooting sign-wavers on the corner when our national embarrassment inevitably starts telling idiots that he’s being cheated?

Hopefully three days from now this seems like Chicken Little talk and we’re all seeing either a light at the end of the tunnel or our impending date with a boxcar.  I’ll take a settled outcome and a plan of action over not knowing what my countrymen are going to do, or how people are going to react if they’ve decided they’ve had enough.

Piling on top of that anxiety is the next installment of my dental repair saga, which takes place in about eight hours.  When this piece launches, I’ll be midway through an extraction and the placement of a new fixed bridge, dropping a good bit of my income from the last couple months into a hole in my mouth as we get closer to solving a problem that’s plagued me my entire adult life.  I’ve written about it here before, but every trip back to the chair reawakens that embarrassment, the memories of being broke and unsure and letting small problems become big ones.

Is it weird that buying a bunch of groceries that I could afford, and then trash-picking a shelf like I was 21 again, made me feel a little better?  It was doing what I can, where I can.  I saved a thing from the landfill, I added a dimension to my space, and dinner’s covered.  I’m out here solving problems and getting shit done like I deserve to be in a tax bracket and have a mortgage and a car and a full head of chompers to eat crunchy things with.

I wish us all the best of luck this week, and as much available light as possible in the newfound dark.

The shelf in its likely new home, unless I decide to wedge it into a different corner