Where Ugly Lives

Big item trash pick-up day has become a monthly neighborhood ritual I dread but can’t help looking forward to a little bit, either. Just when I think there is no way that one month can be topped, the next month will bring forth even more outstanding hideousness.

Big item trash pick-up day gives people license to drag out their biggest, nastiest, dirtiest, UGLIEST, most broken down old couches, chairs, mattresses, appliances and electronics for display on the street corner, in anticipation of the poor trash collectors’ arrival. And people in my fringy neighborhood like to PREPARE for big item trash pick-up day. They’ll usually start pulling stuff out from the bowels of hell’s model home around the beginning of the month, even though the trucks won’t roll through until the third Wednesday of the month. So on our walks, Dot and I get to enjoy these gross alters to the trash gods up close and personally for a couple of weeks each month.

It is AMAZING the kind of crap that people have in their homes. Who lets something get that disgusting before throwing it away? I mean, YUCK! I’ve seen toilets and bathtubs and refrigerators that looks like science petri dishes gone nuclear, and dust covered, gutted ancient electronics that you know haven’t worked in decades. But the furniture is always my favorite – butt ugly floral couches with the springs punching through the arm rests and recliners from 1965 where the foot rest is broken and the seat cushion is missing. I wish I had been taking pictures of all of the ugly couches that have been thrown away in my neighborhood in the last year. 19th Street OKC is like a magnet for the sofas of the damned.

And most of the houses where I see these sights are cute. I certainly understand there might be some poorer people who don’t have the money for new stuff, but these things are usually in front of those nice, well-maintained houses with pretty manicured rose bushes in their yards.

Seriously. Where do people get these aberrations and why weren’t they thrown out on big item trash pick-up day about thirty years ago? My guess – they’re pack rats. Like my grandmother – Mammaw – who at one point had THREE full-sized sofas, ONE love seat and TWO recliners in the living room of her double wide trailer. It gets to a point where they have to throw something overboard to make room for the newer junk they purchased at last weekend’s yard sales.

Even better than seeing what people are going to drag outside every month, is watching what people are going to take home from the other person’s yard. When I’ve been out with Dot early in the morning of big item trash pick-up, the neighborhood is like a bee hive of activity with people slowly driving their trucks from one house to the next rummaging through the crap on the curbs. The fact that someone really does take home that hot pink ceiling fan with two missing blades and no wiring mystifies me.

If it’s true that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, then there are some folks living high on the hog in central Oklahoma City!