New York City Provides...

I will return to this theme a lot over the coming life of this blog.

I have joked that there is no reason to buy a television, a vacuum cleaner or a microwave in New York City, you can find one on the sidewalk at any given time. But almost anything you are looking for tends to show up once you have decided to look for it. Someone mentioned she needed some keyboards and I start finding them. I got a design idea for reusing old chairs and I start finding them. This happens over and over again. I am tempted to attribute this to something mystical, like the power of intention.

I also sometimes view the City as a huge organism which cares for its individual cells like me by delivering to me what I need to grow. Is the moving of waste through the city like the moving of blood through the body?

In my more lucid moments, I suspect that maybe there is just SO MUCH waste that one mind cannot comprehend it all. You can see what you are looking for but all the rest blends together into an amorphous pile. Maybe its like finding constellations in the night sky. With so many stars, any number of constellations are possible. You haven't seen Steego the Armadillo yet? He's up there, your just have to look for him.

Well, its obvious where I go from here... I am visualizing bundles of twenty dollar bills...

NEW YORK CITY PROVIDES...

CRY FREEGAN!

I have been on a couple of dives with the freegans and it has been a spectacular, life changing, experience. Yes, I have been eating what I find. No its not very gross, in fact sometimes its hard to tell what I have bought and what I have foraged.

Each square foot of retail space in NYC has to pull its weight. If a product is not selling it can NOT be allowed to take up space. It must be replaced with something that WILL sell.

What? I am still buying food even though I can forage it for free? Well, like wilderness survival, urban foraging requires the knowledge of where the good foragings are and when. The is no published guidebook, not yet anyway. The first year is the toughest.

Meanwhile, I am finding that I am up to my ears in recovered wood and could use some products and markets.

That will have to end this for today.

STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION