Diving

Today, my roommate and I drove past a dumpster. A beautiful ray of light danced off the edge of a treasure leaning up against it. "Probably nothing..." I thought to myself, but three blocks later, I couldn't get it out of my head.

"Aly!" I eventually blurted out, "On the way home, we have got to take this exact same route and stop by that dumpster we just passed!" She looked at me like I was crazy, but agreed to it.

An hour later, the treasure was still there- a message board in a opening frame with lock and key. There a few others like it, but I choose one and promptly decided it would become my new method for storing jewelry- my necklaces would dangle from it in an oh-so organized manner sometime in the near future...

Just as I'm hauling it back to the car, I hear shouting from down the street. A short little man with big curly hair and a hawaiian shirt walks up. He's yelling and laughing all at the same time. He's obviously a tad crazy. Picture Sean Penn in Sweet and Lowdown...

"Girl, I just got off the bus to come pick up those boards, and here you are! Imagine that! You know how much you could get for these boards? Sure! You could make some dough offa these. These are real aluminum. Sure! You could earn a pretty penny off a these."

"Uhm. Well, I just forced my roommate to take the long way home so I could come back and get this, so..."

"Ah. That's alright girl. You go ahead and take that board."

Now I feel like a jerk. After all, the guy just wasted a bus ride for the boards. Plus, he could apparently make a lot of money off of it... "No, it's okay, you can have it."

"Yeah? These probably worth 'round four bucks each."

My eyes narrow. Seriously? Four dollars? "Actually, I'm going to take this, okay?" And with that I grab the board. I try to be nice, however, and point out the other cool stuff in the dumpster- like a great old handpainted plywood sign, resembling an old movie poster.

"Nah," the guy says, "thats a piece a junk. Prolly real heavy. Now looka this! This is prolly worth a lot!" His eyes widen as he pulls out a piece of wood with four wheels attached to the bottom. "Oh yeah, these wheels prolly worth ten bucks each," he says as slaps one and watches it spin. Suddenly he looks up at me- "Hey, you gotta boyfriend?"

"Yes!" I immediately declare (total lie).

"Ah, thats too bad. You should ditch him and go out with me. We could have fun. We could go dig through dumpsters together and stuff. That would be fun..."

I laugh, tell him thanks for the sign, and wander back to the car.

On second thought, though, I'm having a hard time finding the downside of one of my favorite activities, dumpster diving, on a date with a Sean Penn look-alike.