November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

Talkin' Trash

(Page 2 of 3)

July/August 2002 Issue
By Davy Rothbart, Found magazine 
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What is your attraction to found stuff? What does found stuff mean to you?

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It gives me something to imagine into both while I’m on the prowl and after I find something. I especially like found notes and I used to keep them all together, but my organizing has since exploded. I love conversation notes between two people in class. Two kinds of handwriting ripping on a teacher. Mainly I like the story that smokes up from certain found things. And I like the collections of things one can put together. I collected playing cards I found on the street with the eventual hope of getting a whole deck—a weird sort of lifelong game of solitaire. I still run into the cards all over my house. No organization! When I was in college I nailed rows and rows of nails on one wall and then went out and picked up anything that was U-shaped and hung it on the nail upside down. Everything from tiny little twist ties in a U shape to an actual letter U that fell off a marquee. I loved being able to pick a shape and look for it. This was 25 years ago so, I can’t remember much about it except that by the end of the year the wall looked amazing and no one could believe I found all the U shapes on the street.In high school I started to notice shoes in the road, a single shoe lying here or there and I would think about how the hell that happened. Who loses one shoe in the road and how? I used to stop my 1964 Valiant and go get the shoe and throw it in my trunk. I loved opening my trunk and seeing all of these shoes that had no mates. I probably did it to be a way-out hippie and impress boys. But usually boys have had nothing to do with why I scrounge. Although scrounging had everything to do with why I married a certain someone.I’m married to the king of scrounging. My husband’s the kind of guy who looks down. My kind of guy. Kevin restores prairie. That’s his job. He’s a plant freak. So sometimes when a development is going in we go over to the planned site right before they start digging and find all the native plants and rescue them. This counts as found, I think, if you consider the rescue aspect of finding. He also has a thing about push lawn mowers. He finds them set out for the trash man. We have eight of them in the basement. We do not have a mowable lawn. He has to struggle with himself to keep from picking up more.My husband has furnished our house from dumps and alleyways. He is always coming home with some insane thing he found. Once he brought home a stuffed grizzly bear head. Someone had cut it off of a bearskin rug and put it out on the street with the trash. We dig the found lifestyle. I’ve been with people who were horrified when I bent to pick something up or slammed on the brakes to dig through a pile of trash on the side of the street. "You don’t know where that has been" is either a nightmare or a dream statement depending on the person picking up the thing.
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