My apartment is in a two-floor walkup with a front entrance onto the courtyard and a back entrance onto the tiny parking lot. Directly behind my unit is the big trash bin, the one that’s usually emptied loudly and with careless abandon at roughly 3 in the morning twice a week by garbagemen hopped up on No-Doz and coffee.<\/p>\n
Now that the weather’s warming up, I’m seeing more and more dumpster divers scavenging for usable goods in our trash.<\/p>\n
Today when I came outside, there was a man humming a bluesy tune, his discoveries \u2014 a pair of bright green jelly sandals, a pair of clear plastic women’s shoes, and a single black pump with a crown of fake diamonds near the toe \u2014 fanned out on the pavement beside his feet.<\/p>\n
He kept humming as I got in my car just a few feet away. And, like any other asshole might have done, I kept my eyes low and didn’t look his way the entire time I was backing up and out of the lot.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago there was another man digging through the garbage, a bulging white plastic grocery bag hanging from the crook of his elbow. I got in my car, backed up and out, and I saw him follow behind me as I stopped to wait for traffic to clear so I could pull out. He had one normal eye and one milky white orb. He was skinny, wearing a dirty T-shirt and denim shorts, and he had sort of an erratic, unpredictable look about him. He kept walking past my car and down the sidewalk toward Union Avenue. I don’t know what he found that was worth keeping.<\/p>\n
I often wonder how I should react to the people digging through my trash. Once you encounter enough crazy and moderately threatening bums, you get jaded and decide that the best way to deal with them is to act as though they’re not even there. But every time I do that, I feel the rot take hold in my gut. It’s just not right. I have so much; I should share. Even if it’s a nod or a wave or a friendly word or two. But a nod or a wave isn’t going to do much for these people if they are desperate enough to dig through my trash. They want money, food, socks, hope, a break. My privelege blinds and frustrates me, because I know it’s there and I know there’s no dropping it. I also know that if I tried hard enough, I would be able to just stop seeing the plight and start seeing nothing but an annoyance and inconvenience to me.<\/p>\n
And that’s scary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My apartment is in a two-floor walkup with a front entrance onto the courtyard and a back entrance onto the tiny parking lot. Directly behind my unit is the big trash bin, the one that’s usually emptied loudly and with careless abandon at roughly 3 in the morning twice a week by garbagemen hopped up on No-Doz and coffee. Now that the weather’s warming up, I’m seeing more and more dumpster divers scavenging for usable… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-em","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}