The Dump

[Martin Hash]

One of my favorite places as a kid was Gerber dump; not a garbage dump, more like a salvage yard of things people had thrown out. There was an aluminum airplane body, and a Duesenberg chassis. I bought lots of cool stuff, including old WW2 18.5 volt communications gear. My friends and I would ride our bikes out there and spend hours walking through the debris. My first drink of illicit alcohol was out of an discarded miniature souvenir Italian wine bottle, the bottom half wrapped in a basket. It could have been poison for all I knew but luckily just vinegar by the time I found it. I bought lots of crap, cheap: an army helmet, 4-track tapes, and innumerable bric-a-brac, some of which I still have.

When I finally give one of my projects up for dead, I send it to the dump. I don’t go myself because I want to keep the image in my mind of it ending up in the kind of dump I remember, a salvage purgatory, not good not bad. For example, my brother-in-Law, Steve, took my dozens of old and unique computers of every manufacture, with microprocessors no one has any memory of today: Alpha, Silicon-on-Saphire, PowerPC, Octane; in a load to the dump, and it would have broke my heart to see them destroyed. After each of my failed attempts at political office, my son, Heath, loads the old billboard signs into the pick-up and hauls them away. Recently, making space, there were extra manuals, ones I wrote for my various computer programs for sale over the years, that needed to go away. If I actually saw the reality, it would expose the facade. I know this because when I sent the 1000s of copies of my self-published videogame, “Why Does The Wind Blow?” to the dump, the driver sent me a picture of a tractor pushing them into a big pile a refuse, ruining the illusion I had prepared in my mind. I want to think that early-teen boys will be filled with wonder at their discovery, and maybe my failure will have value after all.

Campaign Signs & Manuals.jpg

[SuburbanFarmer]

Closest thing I could find:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2164200/

I’d really like to see the game, Martin.