Last Saturday morning I met Pete and David and Thomas and Mark and Mike at the vacant lot just east of Buffalo Wild Wings on to pick up trash. We were doing our part for the Great American Cleanup/Don’t Mess with Texas Trash-off, a long name used to describe people all over town working hard to fill big black plastic trash bags with cans and bottles and grocery bags and paper and … well, trash.
It turns out picking up trash can be a cool project if you don’t have to do it every day. It’s fun to do things with the guys, and picking up trash provides a lot of opportunities to joke around and make fun of each other, which pretty much sums up social interaction between men. If we can’t crack jokes and make fun of each other, we usually have nothing to say. And in the long run, if two guys cannot find a way to pick on each other, they will never be close friends. Such is the world of men.
So the six of us fanned out across one end of the pasture and started filling our trash bags. This particular vacant lot turned out to be bigger, on foot, than it appeared whenever we drove past in our pickup trucks.
I have participated in the Trash-off many times before, and at the beginning of the day I am very aggressive to pick up even the tiniest gum wrapper. As the morning progresses and my back gets sore from all the bending over, I get more selective about what I’ll pick up. A piece of trash has to be large enough to be worthy of the back pain. And then, toward the end of the morning, I look only for clusters of trash so I can bend over once to pick up several pieces at the same time.
One of the trash items I found this year was lying half-buried in the sand beside a small yucca plant – a black weather-worn 5-1/4� floppy disk. It had been outside a long time and was unusable as computer data storage or retrieval, even if you could find a computer with a 5-1/4� drive.
What was interesting to me was how all the guys reacted to the sight of the disk. We just laughed at the thought of something so old … old enough to seem ancient to us, but not substantial enough to qualify as an antique. Not everything old is an antique; sometimes it is just trash.
I wondered how something like a 5-1/4� floppy disk could become obsolete so quickly. In my lifetime, in fact. I am guessing you wouldn’t have to go very far back in history to find a time when nothing went obsolete in one generation.
What was once new is now old; what was once cutting-edge technology is now trash. And the 3-1/2� disks that replaced this old 5-1/4� floppy are also obsolete, replaced by recordable CDs. And CDs have been replaced by small flash drives (for data) and mp3 players (for music), and there is no reason to believe either of those two products will outlast my generation. Since I graduated from college, I’ve watched computers go through several transformations: from easy-correcting typewriters, to really fast calculators, to multi-media telephones, to personal assistants.
And yet, we seem to be comfortable living in a rush-to-obsolete world, taking new technology as it comes, throwing old technology out the window into the vacant lot east of Buffalo Wild Wings. It reminds me of something John Fischer wrote: “My salvation story has not been so much about conversion as it has been about extraction, like peeling away the outer layer of traditional Christian expectations from the orange of my Christian experience, trying to determine what to keep and what to throw away.�
Me, too. I’ve been thinking about this notion of peeling away what doesn’t fit, throwing stuff over the side that I don’t want. The longer I walk with God the less I care about the parts of my life that don’t match up to Him. I end up throwing more and more stuff away because I just don’t need it any more.
I remember one sad Saturday when I finally carried a box to the dumpster that contained the computer programs I’d written in engineering school, all written in Fortran, and all on key-punch cards. I had finally accepted the fact that I would never have the use of a card reader to run those programs, and besides, I wasn’t that good at programming anyway. So I reluctantly carried them to the alley and tossed them into the dumpster. The cards had become obsolete and it was time to throw them away.
