There is a moment at the Goodwill bin store when three dozen people stand behind a red line, waiting to be allowed to dig through the trash. When the bin store employees say go, the people surge past the line and descend on the bins like a swarm.
The merchandise is sold by the pound, in huge vats of junk that shoppers must dig through. Goodwill recommends protective gloves.
The bin store is like a casino. There is a sense of hopeful anticipation, a faith that somewhere within the bins of trash are things of real value. In the same way a casino patron hopes for the slot machine payout, the bin store shopper yearns to uncover the vintage Levi’s, the Le Creuset pot, the sport coat with a forgotten $250 in the front pocket.
As in a casino, the bin store is disorienting. On no discernible schedule, the workers demand that shoppers move behind the red perimeter line as new bins are brought out. The bins themselves are organized into very loose categories—clothes, home goods, books—but these get increasingly jumbled the longer the bins remain on the floor. In the evening, as the sun sets, the light slants in through the high windows on the west wall in thin streams that give me an almost instant, low-grade headache.
Many of the bin store shoppers have a practiced air. They park their carts by the walls, so they’re less encumbered while digging through the bins. One of these shoppers is my neighbor, Anthony.
In our neighborhood, Anthony tends an enormous front yard garden, from which he welcomes the neighborhood kids to eat as many strawberries as they want. In the bin store, he has a dead-eyed stare: that of an addict looking for his next hit, or a person clinging desperately to the lower rungs of an economic system designed for profit over humanity.
I don’t judge Anthony for his attitude in the bin store in part because I share it. The bin store demands that we face late-stage capitalism and ourselves: its mountains of shit and our willingness to squeeze that much more blood out of the turnip. So far I’ve made $274 selling my bin store finds.
To be clear, there is some salvation here. The stuff that I and other shoppers pull from the bins doesn’t end up in the landfill, or is at least delayed in getting there. The world is marginally better, maybe, because I found and resold that vintage souvenir Washington state drink tray.
In Capital, Karl Marx explains that poverty is not an accidental failure of capitalism, but rather a systemic requirement. He argues that the deeply impoverished are a “reserve army of labor,” which functions as a metaphorical cudgel to scare and discipline the working class. In other words, if you’ve ever been afraid of ending up homeless, that is by design.
Last month, my husband quit the job that had made him miserable for many years. I am trying to celebrate this for what it is: bravery, despite what it triggers: a lizard-brain fear. He has already found a part-time job and is starting some freelance projects. Still, the cudgel looms.
This was the summer of the Spokane Complex Fires, the worst wildfires in Spokane’s history. Together, three wildfires burned over 900 homes.
Although the fires happened only a few miles from my house, I experienced them entirely through my phone. The National Guard blocked off the fire areas. I watched news clips and saw pictures on Reddit. I got texts and calls from out-of-state friends, and I told them that they were seeing what I was seeing. It was only days later, as the smoke descended over the city, that it impacted me directly.
Around the same time, news broke that an arsonist had set the Old Trails Fire, the biggest of the three. He apparently confessed to it and half a dozen other recent wildfires. What had seemed like straightforward evidence of climate collapse instantly became something much more palatable: a true crime story. Like watching the fires through my phone, the arson offered a level of remove, an escape hatch through something unbearable.
Two weeks ago I was in my old college town, having what I can only describe as a crisis of faith. It’s been a hard summer. Picture me: eating a Subway sandwich in a parked car, the saddest I’ve been in recent memory. I needed an escape hatch.
The next day it arrived in the form of a woman, a friend of a friend I was meeting for the first time. She’s an organic farmer a decade older than me. She eats her oatmeal directly from the pot, holding the handle in one hand and the spoon in the other. We talked about her daughter’s recent anemia, midlife, farming. She told me she’s into Ho’oponopono, a Hawaiian spiritual practice built around four phrases. They’re high-energy phrases, she told me.
So lately I’ve been doing Ho’oponopono, or at least a secondhand version of it. It might be another escape hatch, but it might be something else: a little salvation here at the end of the world. I’m in the bin store up to my elbows in trash, or at home watching my husband’s job search. Repeating the phrases she taught me, as if they might really do something: I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you.
Kid Springfield 