THE GOLDEN AGE OF GARBAGE

as my husband and I walked through sweetwater park yesteday, we noticed a lot of garbage tangled in the rocks and winter branches along the water's edge. this is a divinely beautiful place. it's a bandaid we use to place over our craving for deeper woods. as a space, it offers a modicum of personal reflection to soul-weary city dwellers.

sweetwater park has running through it a giant urban river with rocks that look like petrified tree trunks. on days when the water's low, you can walk out across the broad width of it. but despite it's magnificence, it also carries a negative charge. friends warn us not to swim in the waters, for it's downstream from the big city and therefore extremely polluted. people get sick after touching it. there's a corpse of a giant cotton mill whose bricks were made by slaves. we passed "lynch st." on the way in. we've started to notice a population of gray herons hanging around the small rapids. they are immigrants from more southern places and have somehow acclimated to the colder waters. this environment makes for a rather bizarre mix of nature and human history, of healing in the midst of residue. visits here often become symbolic for us.

this time (2.22) garbage was the theme of our visit.

everyone I know is liquidating. Dimitri Orlov recommends that in seriously downturned economic times, it's better to have physical goods than cash stored away in banks. if the currency is devalued, you can always trade, sell or make good use of your things. . .in extreme cases, you can burn them for heat, or pick through them for nutrients. . .

high captialism created stockpiles of wasteful things, which are now being shaken down and freed up at unprecedented rates. All this junk now floods the independent markets for repurposing. As starving artist types we know what to do in such a golden river of junk and disorder. . .this is a golden age of sorts.

("starve:" it's only a relative term for us americans. . . it may mean no ipods, no cable tv, no new cars or designer clothes, meager travel. . .unrenovated living quarters, vintage computers and outdated operating systems, gardens in empty lots. . .we're make-do citizens but are quite artsy in how we fashion our junk and make use of our free time. . . and we're inclined to survive quite well these next couple of years.)