Disposable Society

Tom didn't get me his list yet, so I'm going to vent a little about disposable "stuff." There's too much of it. Think about how many things in your house are disposable (and yeah, we've got a lot of them, too). Those little plastic dental floss-pick things? We love them. But we got along just fine without them, and could and should again. Disposable razors? We don't have any of those (Tom is be-whiskered) -- in fact, those are about the dumbest things ever invented. Is it really so hard to change a blade? And a package of blades costs more than a new razor, so go figure.

Those are just little things. It's the big things that we object most to.

Vacuum cleaners that are nearly impossible to repair, even though they're repairable. It's cheaper (and easier) to buy a new one than to even replace the belt. We've had a rental house next door to us for years, and every time a group moved out, a vacuum cleaner ended up in the trash. Tom pulls them out, fixes them, and keeps our kids and their friends in vacuums.

One that has most recently irritated me are ink-jet computer printers. I have a really good Epson printer/scanner that came packaged with my computer. It retails by itself for about $150. Pretty good deal, right? But the damn ink for the thing costs $80 (4 color cartridges). Buy ink twice, and it's cheaper to buy a new printer. Where's the sense in that? I hate to think how many perfectly good printers end up in the land fill.

The one nearest and dearest to Tom's heart (and that he soap-boxed to me about for over an hour this morning) is bicycles. He keeps picking them up and fixing them up. I picture him someday as one of those eccentric old guys who makes sure every kid in the neighborhood has a bike. The thing is, anyone can afford a decent bike at Wal-Mart, and as soon as the least little thing goes wrong with it, they dump it and buy a new one. The most recent one he picked up is a most excellent 70s-era Raleigh, and he pulled it out of a dumpster at an apartment building.

The list goes on and on. We're such a selfish and spoiled society that we just can't be bothered. Those garbage trucks come in the dark of the early morning, and magically cart away the flotsam and jetsam of our "busy" lives.

We have a lady that cruises the alley behind our house every Sunday and Wednesday night (nights before garbage pick-up), looking for anything salvagable. She's been doing it for years, and you'd think she'd figure out that we rarely have anything of interest to anybody in our trash. I guess she gets so much "good" stuff from the neighbors that it makes it worth her while.

This whole issue is the bane of Tom's existence, so I'm pretty sure the topic will show up here again.

Random strange thing I noticed today: The guy behind me at the supermarket was buying 4 giant bales of toilet paper, 12-15 boxes of Kleenex, and 4 cases of Keystone beer. Nothing really wrong with that, I just thought it was weird.