Ahhh, spring is here, and you know what that means.  It’s time for barbecues, parades and of course, the ever-popular Spring Clean-Up.  The period set aside, by God himself if I’m not mistaken, for the women of the world to go through their houses saying, “That, and that, and oh, that can go.  How did you manage to accumulate all this junk, anyways?”

Yeah, you can try to justify it, but is it really worth the effort?  While you’re trying to explain to her why it is so important to hold on to your vintage speakers that you made, completely from scratch and without instructions, for your dorm room back in the early sixties, she’s already at the other end of the house digging dangerously close to the collection of Playboy’s dating back to their beginning that’s hidden under the staircase.  You could pray that she drops of sheer exhaustion, but it would take the force of a nuclear meltdown to stop her at this point…

The city I live in sponsors a spring clean-up each year, where it sets aside a short period when you can leave just about anything out by the curb to be hauled away forever.  I think it’s great because it saves us from having to hide every little thing we want to toss inside our normal garbage bags and let’s face it, even those jumbo garbage bags just aren’t big enough to conceal an old water heater or couch, at least not convincingly…

So the last day before our pick-up came and everyone in the neighborhood was hauling their junk to the curb in masses, piling up everything from refrigerators to old furniture, even old plants!  It was fairly obvious that our clean-up was right around the corner, but if you were just visiting from out of town, you’d have thought you had wandered into someplace like Norwick, Kentucky, where you might be able to find a complete set of teeth if you add up those of the entire trailer park.  If anyone from Norwick reads this, I just have one word for you: bathe.

I was just finishing up on my trips out to the roadside when I noticed something that seemed just a tad disturbing to me.  Down the street came a van that, upon reaching the piles in front of each house,  would stop and unload its passengers.  Unfortunately, they weren’t dropping off their own junk, which is prohibited by the city even though people do it anyways.  No, they were actually browsing! I am not making this up, and believe me, I wish that I could.  They wouldn’t get out at all of the stops, only the ones that looked promising.  Flashlight beams shined from the windows as they gave each pile a preliminary inspection and, if good pickin’s were present, they would get out to give things a closer look.

Now I understand that our economy is at a low right now, but is this really the answer?  I stood not ten feet from a pile as they rooted through with the hope and excitement of a child’s Christmas morning.  I think I could’ve started throwing rocks at them to drive them away, but they probably would’ve just gathered up those, too, to take home to use in their rock polishers.  (Find a rock, polish it, and sell it for profit…it’s just like walking on gold!) This makes me wonder if they look forward to this night every year, or if I might actually come home to find them going through my garbage looking for breakfast one morning.  At least the homeless have enough dignity to sit on the corner and wait for handouts.

“But some people actually do throw out some perfectly good stuff,” you say.  Well, this may be, but I don’t exactly live in the type of area where my neighbors are pitching their clothes after they’ve been worn once – if something’s getting thrown out, there’s a reason!  Sure, that armchair might look fine from the driver’s seat of your van, but I guarantee that if the loose springs in the cushion don’t make you jump, the termites living in it will.  Spring clean-up is the time set aside to get rid of everything that you know you can’t give away at a garage sale, or in our case, it’s time to pitch everything that we’ve been saving for ten years for a garage sale.  “No one wants our crap anyways, and if they do, they can go down to the dump and sort through it whenever they’d like!”

I’m not a big fan of garage sales, either, mainly because you can never find anything worthwhile at them anymore.  There used to be a time when you could find old stereos, video games and various mechanical junk – basically all the guy stuff that his wife was making him get rid of.  It would eminently end up in your next garage sale, too, but it was still cool to have sitting around for a while.  Nowadays garage sales are dominated by girly stuff, by which I mean clothes, clothes, kitchen supplies, and more clothes.  Unfortunately, babies are the most common victims in these practices because, as we all know, you can’t walk into a garage sale today without tripping over bags and bags of baby clothes – two for a dollar!  And why are they priced so cheaply affordably?  They’re all saturated with baby vomit, of course…

Purchasing clothing at a garage sale is something I will never do because no matter how many times you wash something, there’ll always be that feel that you know someone else wore those pants before you, and you have no idea what his activities were when he owned them!  I’ve also heard of instances where underwear has been found for sale (only a quarter a pair), but that’s just wrong.  I never thought I’d plug the Home Shopping Network, but if garage sales are your only alternative, I say go for it!  At least this way you know you’re getting new worthless crap…

And stay out of my garbage!