He Lives in a Dump

You know, I don’t ask for too much in this workaday world. A plot of land to call my own. A decent pot with a good-sized chicken in it. Maybe an accent table or a fern for atmosphere.

The one thing I would like to avoid, however, is living in a dumpster. I was reading an article about a man who actually has made his home in a 36-square-foot dumpster as part of a “social experiment.” Yeah, let me know the results of that experiment. I’ll be over here living in a normal house.

The point is apparently to convert the trash receptacle, which I emphasize is usually for trash, into a sustainable home and “text the extreme limits of what one needs for a good life.” I would think — and this is just personal preference talking — that one might need at the very least some sort of lighting, heating system and running water.

Here is a quote from this man’s girlfriend: It was a gray afternoon in January, and Jeff and I were standing side-by-side atop a mountain of trash after “home shopping” for his new place. The landfill didn’t smell nearly as bad as I had imagined on the overcast drive over. Waste dozers plowed into pyramids of muddy clothes, plastic bags and beer bottles, shifting the debris from one pile to another.

… okay.

The dumpster is small enough that he has to sleep diagonally across it. When the girlfriend sleeps over, she sleeps in a triangle of space next to him after hoisting herself “through the sliding metal door.” Aww, sweet. She notes that “Sometimes there’s the rattle of a stolen shopping cart … In the dumpster, there’s only an eighth inch of steel separating us from the motion of the outside world. That’s part of the magic.” Sounds like camping, only without the things that make camping fun, like nature.   

But don’t over-glamorize voluntarily living in a place where people throw their garbage, cautions the girlfriend. Once some drunk guys pissed on the dumpster. “The bar-hoppers were either too hammered to register the noise or too sober to accept the possibility that a human might be inside,” she lamented. To be fair, it’s not unreasonable to expect dumpsters to be empty of people and rather filled with refuse, which is their intended purpose. Homeless people do have to live in dumpsters but the difference between them and this guy is that the homeless didn’t deliberately decide to downgrade their living circumstances.

This person also decided to sell most of his possessions for $1 each before moving into La Maison des Ordures. I mean, who needs all that stuff, right? Like things you’ve saved for and scraped together over a period of years. They’re just weighing you down.

If this person doesn’t own other property, once the experiment is up, how would he find another place to live? What would a bank or landlord say if he tells them the last place he lived was a trash receptacle? Do you think they’d say “I admire your commitment to sustainable living” or would they smile and nod and place an ominous note in his file?

I guess I shouldn’t make fun of someone who is apparently having a raging midlife crisis after what I assume was a humdinger of a divorce. But I don’t consider it extravagant to live in my little rowhome with central heating and sleep next to my husband on an actual bed without people pissing on our wall. I am all for sustainable living to a point. I’ll recycle and grow food and use solar power. Is it too much to ask to be able to live responsibly while not living in a GD dumpster?