Recycling Not So Much for Dummies as for the Mentally Retarded

There are many and varied ways of recycling old and useless materials and thus go some small way towards reducing the intolerable burden our species is thoughtlessly placing on the rapidly dwindling resources of our overstressed planet.  The most popular method is probably the "Greatest Hits" album.  However coming a close second in the popularity stakes is the garage sale.

For those who don't know a garage sale is essentially a means by which we get complete strangers to pay us for the privilege of transferring crap from our house to theirs.  They are the means by which we get rid of all the useless garbage that has been cluttering up our homes for years.  There doesn't seem to be any other way.  None of it appears to biodegrade, at least not within an acceptable timescale, and for reasons I can't possibly explain we point blank refuse to just throw the damn stuff out.  The things we sell at garage sales are the sort of things we didn't even remember we had until the time comes to flog them off to an unsuspecting member of the public.  We've never used any of it and probably don't even know where we got it.  Although if I had to take a guess I'd say we probably bought most of it at garage sales.

You can buy almost anything at a garage sale except anything valuable or useful.  There are however a few staples without which a garage sale cannot be said to be complete.  There will be the brightly coloured, mismatched plastic kitchen utensils.  There will be at least one hideous poster/print which the purchaser thought would make them look edgy or avant garde but now just demonstrates what a tasteless tosser they were and finally there will be a small but well thumbed collection of paperbacks. I use the term "well thumbed" advisedly.  It's entirely possibly these books have never been read.  Which is probably all to the good if you want future generations to have any interest at all in literature.  These books have been well thumbed by people thumbing through them at garage sales.

With these items as a foundation you then toss in anything broken, outdated, tasteless and unwanted (including in extreme cases kittens and surplus to requirements children) and then invite the general public in to paw through the tawdry flotsam of your life in the pitiable hope that there are other people stupid enough to buy this stuff.  In return for essentially paying to take your garbage out these people get to roll their eyes dramatically at your possessions, make value judgements on your homemaking ability and somehow forget that they are buying the stuff you are finally getting rid of second hand.

This seems like an eminently fair trade off to me and the planet will thank you for it.  Or at least the planet would thank you for it if anyone ever used anything they bought at a garage sale.  In actual fact we buy this stuff, toss it into the garage and then go to the shops to get the stuff we actually use.  So the actual benefit to the planet from a garage sale is virtually nil.  I wouldn't worry too much though.  When, finally, the planet is exhausted, filthy, crumbling and unliveable we'll probably be able to sell it to some gullible species at a garage sale.