Wasted Words

Is this good photography?

Objectively?

Hahaha, no.

Hell no.

It might even be the worst photograph that you have ever seen posted to this community.

It's talentless trash. In fact, I hate it.

I mean, look at it! There's no sense of balance. The colors are muted, but not in a tasteful way. The lighting is poor....

There's no clear subject and the contents spill off frame with no sense of aesthetic unless we're specifically looking to capture "ugly".

And nothing in the image actually comes into focus-- whether you're looking at the foreground or the background everything is fuzzy and awkwardly placed and uninteresting.

Where's the emotion here?

Is this art?

And doesn't it kinda seem like the photographer's hand might have been unsteady?

Well, it was.

I happen to know that for a fact, because the photographer is me. And my hand was shaking at the time.

I'm not trying to be dramatic here, I'm just stating the facts.

And the first fact is, I was shaking a bit.

It was a combination of a couple things: adrenaline and urgency, surprise and disappointment, disbelief... and maybe a teeny tiny pinch of rage.

So. What the hell are we looking at here?

We are looking at a terrible waste, that's for sure.

How many moving boxes do you see there, in that chaos?

I think I see maybe 15? But this is just the edge of the pile, there are more underneath and more out of frame. I'd estimate that what we can see here is only about one third of the boxes my friends and I saw that night.

So there were maybe 45 boxes in a heap there. And each one was full of discarded books. I'd give a rough, conservative estimate of probably 20 books per box which means that there were probably upwards of 900 books in this pile.

But wait, there's more!

There were two watermelon bins FULL to overflowing with loose books.

Back in school, I always hated those annoying geometry problems where you had to calculate how many miscellaneous things would fit in a space, given a certain volume.

I hated those problems first and foremost because fuck math. But I also hated them because they felt unrealistic and therefore impractical.

BUT-- all this being said, it might be useful to gauge a rough estimate of how many books were being discarded in these pallet sized cardboard units.

Each watermelon bin was around 4 ft x 3 ft x 3ft, which gives us a rough volume of around 36 cubic feet in each bin. Now the books weren't stacked neatly, they were just tossed in there, strained binding and all. So I doubt we could inventory more than 12 books per cubic foot.

Still, that's a 432 books per bin, a LOW estimate. Two of those bins, on top of the clusterfuck of boxes I photographed, and I'm guessing there were around one and a half thousand books there that night.

Again, FUUUUCK math. Amirite?

But this isn't really math's fault.

At best, math is mere observer.

Why were these books there though? Why were they left in heaps outdoors?

My friends and I wondered....

Context: there were three of us out that night. We were dumpster diving outside of a national thrift store retailer on a somewhat rainy Sunday morning, around 1 AM.

While these books were not specifically in a dumpster, it was utterly clear-- beyond any shadow of a doubt-- that they were being discarded. They were out in the open, after hours, stacked haphazardly beside the thrift store's actual dumpster.

There's no chance they were intended for processing and secondhand sale-- at least not as intact books: the pile wasn't protected from the weather at all-- the books near the top of the pile were actually soaked and already moldy. So my friends and I figured they'd been sitting there gathering dust and farming mildew for at least a day or two.

I do not know whether they were ultimately destined for a landfill. At the very least I hope they might have slated for recycling. Better to pulp those books than to simply let them rot.

But why were they being discarded in the first place? The sheer volume was so staggering, it left me thinking that the thrift store just decided to cut an entire department. Either that or they just got flooded with so many donations that they had no way to process them aside from the catch all of discarding them en masse.

Stores do this-- especially thrift and secondhand stores. They shoot excess donations into the landfill the same way little kids sweep their old toys under the rug.

But... My friends and I didn't know the whole story and all we could do when we saw this mountain of books was stand there in the rain and venture our own unsatisfying guesses.

We kept asking each other how the fuck this could happen. I wasn't the only one in shock, but I might have been the most shook up out of the three of us.

I snapped a picture because I simply couldn't believe the sheer volume of wasted literature.

And yeah, I was shaking. As a writer and a reader I fucking treasure books.

Yeah I'm a book worm and a nerd.

But it's not just about what I like: I think it's a terrible shame to see art of any kind go to waste.

Actually, sometimes deliberate wasting of art can be art in and of itself, as a demonstration or celebration of impermanence. But THIS wasn't that.

Now, personally, I'm aware there's such a thing as the waste of hoarding.

Especially when it comes to books. But I think there are tiers of wastefullness. It's wasteful to produce and consume in excess. It's even more wasteful to simply accumulate in excess, beyond what even what a glutton can consume. That's called hoarding.

And here I am, guilty.

I've actually had to build myself extra shelves, specifically to sort and store my many volumes. It's not a full-blown library in my home, but I have one set of shelves dedicated to favorites I've read and another couple sets of shelves dedicated to books I've picked up along the way but haven't got around to reading yet.

Truly, I've accumulated too many books over the years. I don't know if I'll ever catch up with my reading list, because I seem to buy (or otherwise acquire) books faster than I can read them.

One of my favorite book sellers (shoutout to Jonathon at Yesterday's Muse in Webster NY) once told me there's actually a Japanese word for this type of behavior: tsundoku! (links go to Yesterday's Muse Insta page and the Tsundoku wikipedia page).

Anyway, I'm wasting those books, when you really think about it.

So I'm trying to be more deliberate about my book accumulation (And, more generally my stuff accumulation.) So I deliberately slowed down my book buying. I know I shouldn't waste money or space on things I'm not ready to actually use.

After all, materialism is slow rot for the soul.

But: tiers of wastefullness.

I could not in good conscience walk away from the treasures that lay buried and forgotten in the 15-hundred-strong discard pile. I thought about all the possible value there-- rare books and beautiful stories that would be sent to the shredder at best or the festering dump heap at worst.

As far as I'm concerned it's a little better for books to sit on my shelf where they maybe never be read than it is for books to sit in a landfill where they are guaranteed to rot.

Unless my friends and I intervened, these books were going to the highest tier of wastefullness.

So we sifted and dug and rescued what we thought we would like to read. I filled a clean heavy duty garbage bag and a couple boxes too.

That was just for my personal stake.

My friends are both far less nerdy than I am, and still they each rescued a handful or two of their own. They're both Game of Thrones fans, and we happened to find a collector's edition of one of those books, still in the shrink wrap.

And the whole time we dug and sifted for books-- I wracked my brain, trying desperately to figure out a way to save more.

But what could I do?

What could we do?

I thought of other friends who are bigtime book lovers too. But the rain was picking up. I very much doubted that my comparatively normal friends would appreciate a middle of the night phone call, extending an invitation to dumpster dive soggy books in the dark. Even if that seems well-intentioned to me, I figure it's probably too adventurous-- maybe even awkward or intrusive-- for most folks.

And again, the rain was picking up.

Even those who I thought might have been eccentric enough to leap out of their comfy beds and race across town for the cause would be hard pressed to get there before the books were drenched and ruined.

And again-again-again, the rain was picking up.

My friends and I finally had enough of the cold and the damp. We piled back into my SUV and cranked the heat to warm our cold fingers.

While I dried my glasses I thought about our shared haul: the books weren't the only things we rescued that night.

We dumpster dived 4 or 5 different plazas and had to fold down the third row seats to make room for all the stuff we hauled away: kitchenware, electronics, art/ decor, scrapable brass and copper, unopened hygiene supplies, appliances, toys for our kids, and lots more.

And even with the third row seats down, we really were maxed out on load space.

I remember listening to the pieces of brass tubing clanging against together as I took the turns, and I remember thinking: of all the crazy shit we found tonight, the best rescues in my trunk right now are the books.

The rain was beating down at that point, my windshield looked like a flooded river.

And I remember thinking of all the books we had to leave behind....

What a shame....

To this day, I still regret not rescuing more.

Nothing lasts forever but couldn't I have delayed the finality of rot for a few more of those books?

Probably.

But even now, I have more books than I have read.

But not more than I can read.

That means now, I have an opportunity-- to reduce the waste attached to the books I brought home!

It's a fat and hefty reading list that I've got to work on, and some of these books will be dusty by the time I get to them. But when I touch the pages I'll remember where they came from.

If you're curious about some of the rescues, here are a few cool ones:

(I don't know if they're worth anything, but judging these books by their covers... I'm in for a few treats! Some are actually signed by authors and illustrators which makes their rescue feel almost personal.)

Oh and apologies for the blur!

You can imagine my embarrassment, posting these shots to the photography community.

My phone broke at a bad time and until I get it fixed I'm using a very outdated model and yeah, the difference is so gritty you can almost taste it.