A couple of cold, rainy, mid-May days gave me time to create a short video of America Pastime’s B Sides. These are the pics posted to Instagram in April in the #2 or #3 spot on any given day. Together with the day’s featured pic they portray a tiny fraction of the litter I’ve picked up, assessed, meditated on, arranged for documentary purposes, and then thrown away. By conservative estimate, I’ve handled over 300lbs of other people’s refuse over the last month.
I know absolutely nothing about the people whose trash I pick up. Oddly enough this allows a sense of proximity, understanding, even acceptance.
Each muddied cellophane wrapper, burst plastic cup, striped straw, corroding technology, cosmetic vial, or glinting snack bag is a momentary intersection of emphatically distinct lives. Stooping down, over and over, I consider divergent goals grappling with a Cheeto’s bag on the fringe of well-worn paths. One neighbor tears into the promise of salty satisfaction and quickly moves on, a shadowy stereotype of carelessness. Another neighbor, me, looks for purpose and viability by proposing that trash is worthy of respect and attention. Neither role is ideal nor sustainable.
At the other end of the tenuous collaboration that is America Pastime are the individuals who validate the undertaking by liking, sharing, commenting on and, most thankfully, purchasing the images that result from trashing. They embody the project’s ambitious, precarious, absurd goals of investing litter with new value. We are all in this together, not the least being the plastic bag blowing across the street coming to rest at the fence line where it becomes the landscape that we accept by ignoring.