junk

Junk: The street name for heroin. Garbage. Trash.

One of the things we learn about junk eventually (whether we’re talking plastic grocery bags or smack) is that we can’t throw it away, even when we’ve stopped using it. We try to bury our junk, but it lurks uncomfortably close. Think landfills. Think the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch. Think our innermost secrets.

We might stop asking for plastic bags at the grocery store, but we haven’t found a way to clean up that great spiral of trash floating in the Pacific Ocean. We can’t even fly our trash to the moon—it would take too much rocket fuel. We may stop shooting dope, partying till we blackout, or pouring another’s booze down the drain—but our addictions still animate us.

Junk has become an inescapable part of us.

One thing we can do with our junk is recycle or reuse it. Create art from our junk. Tell our stories. Real stories.

This is not your 12-step group. This is not your therapy session.

This is story-telling at its finest. This is recycling junk and reusing worn out stuff. Whether accumulating in the Pacific Ocean or the great gyre of buried stories inside each one of us, we might as well recycle and reuse our junk.

It’s not going away.