So Much Junk, So Few Gigabytes

Make no mistake about it. We live in the most junk obsessed society on the face of the planet.

Take the "news" and blogger buzz last week. I mean, what incident of significance happened? Correct, it was all about an overweight, drunk 25-year-old stumbling around on a stage in Las Vegas? Search on YouTube, and you'll find 2,160 clips referencing the Britney Spears VMA fiasco. Just so you know that United States Americans (to borrow a phrase from Miss South Carolina) have their priorities straight, you'll find only 76 references to General Petraeus' report to Congress. (Huh, what's that about? Who's Petraeus? What's a Congress?) Amazingly, you'll actually find a total of five references to the bombings in Kathmandu, needless to say none of them in English. (Hey, those folks don't matter, they only make clothes to sell at H&M, they can't actually shop there.)

Nobody cares that people are getting killed by bombs in Nepal and Iraq, right? We want to see Britney bomb.

What's really spooky about this is that there will actually be plenty of people buying the crap she has to sell. We all need another chance to listen to that great message she has to share in her lyric that goes something like "Gimme, gimme, gimme more." However, I'm not clear what she is pleading for in excess -- more dollars for her CDs or just more plain old Chicken McNuggets. All that matters is gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme...

All of this got me to thinking about all the junk that's out there and the very name and intent of this site. I mean, for cryin' out load, there is just so much useless product that we toil away our waking hours in order to waste dollars on and ascribe meaning to. But why are we buying it when there are so many treasures waiting for us to nab for free?

Why do so many of us feel that it's really important that we've bought something with a Kenneth Cole label even though he never saw the garment that was dreamed up by some junior assistant who spent 10 minutes designing and some woman in Nepal wove together and got 50 cents for her 10 hours of labor.

That was one of the reasons I decided to start a blog in the first place, to reclaim the junk that gets ignored or thrown in the trash heap. There is a lot of junk out there and a lot of stories behind each piece. So over the past few days, I've been encouraged to come across others who feel the same.

Eva Deadbeat, has a great new vlog about Found magazine. I came across the 'zine in a bookstore over the weekend, and it was heartening to see another like-minded group roaming the U.S. in their van to collect and ascribe meeting to junk they find. The whole concept of being a Junk Thief is not original, and more than a year ago when I predicted the coming Junk Thief revolution, I knew that I was neither the originator nor alone in my quest to promote finding and ascribing meaning to all the trashy treasures out there. The question is, will all the junk thieves ever manage to connect? I'm curious if the creators of the play Lost and Found in the Mission that made an entire musical production centered around trash lingering in the streets of our fair city and staged at the now sadly departed Jon Sims Center and Junk Pirate magazine know about each other as well as Junk Thief and Found magazine. The best thing about Found magazine is that it has nothing mined form Google searches, just plain old-fashioned, physical gleaning. I think we all should make a convoy of funky old vans and tour the country. And as hungry junk thieves, we'll probably look a lot more appealing as we dance in our skivvies belting out "Gimme, gimme, gimme more (junk)."