Snippet: Broken Chair
I am here to make my contribution to the well of human detritus. To make the evidence of my unwanted disappear. My home with fresh available space, I put my clutter on someone else. Make it the world's problem. Five dollars a bag. Ten for the oversized items. I pay the convenience fee and walk my offering to the pit. It's at least the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Maybe a regulation football field. The crunch of the compactor makes room for every additional item, brought in unwanted. Fees paid. Junk dumped and forgotten. Furniture. A bureau–MDF board, broken and lying in a soggy heap after last night's rain. A broken chair, its single leg snapped off from the bottom of the seat, one wheel missing. Its standard red fabric stained down the center of the backrest. A refrigerator. A separate pit holds the CRTs that still come in from somewhere. The computer towers and monitors. There's no point to it all. We consume and consume and consume. No conscience even among the conscientious. The crumbs of our feast fall in heaps across the earth. Swept out of sight for a small fee. Author's Note: These snippets are unedited free-writing exercises that I use as a way to shift my brain into a creative state. I use Lynda Barry's What It Is YouTube timed exercises (usually 9 minutes worth of writing) for these. They are handwritten in a composition notebook and then typed up here. As I transcribe them, I make minor grammar and spelling corrections, but the overall "clarity" (if you can call it that) of the exercise is left as-is.