Collecting Cans

Tuesday evening as I was walking home, I saw a white kid in his twenties, rummaging through a trash barrel along Flatbush Ave. He looked clean cut, which was totally weird because usually the men I see rifling through garbage in NYC are the types who wear soiled winter coats in hot July weather. So the kid was collecting cans, which go for $ .05 in New York when returned to some sort of major grocery store. Usually, can collecting is a full time job undertaken by a few die hard individuals in New York who will create a wagon train of up to three shopping carts and pull them along through traffic, filling them with returnable cans from the trash barrels. In order to make money at this,I figure you have to be a serious can collector. I mean it takes 20 cans to make $1, and that's after sifting through a lot of sticky shit! My point: can collecting is not a casual hobby in NYC, it is a full time job. These were the thoughts racing through my head in the few seconds I spent staring. Who was this guy? What was happening? I was so confused, until the kid lifted the upper half of his body out of the trash barrel and I saw that he was wearing a t-shirt with the word "Albion" written boldly on the front. It all made perfect sense. This kid was a fellow Michiganian. Albion is a college and a town in Michigan. In Michigan the natives practice diligent "pop" can collecting to get a $.10 deposit. It can be really lucrative, my brother always used the pop cans in our garage for weed money. But this kid had his native pop can collecting practice so ingrained into his DNA, that here he was doing it in 90 degree heat on Flatbush Ave in Brooklyn. I felt sorry for him, because that's messy and also, maybe he was really hurting for (beer) money? But c'mon, a $.05 deposit, that just isn't enough incentive man! And even if you are into the environment and worry about the cans ending up in a landfill- don't worry! We've got people for that! Yo, only when you are in Michigan do you need to go back to your old ways.