In my neighborhood, it’s an unspoken rule that if you have something you’re getting rid of, you leave it on the sidewalk. This leads to a beautiful, constant, low-volume sidewalk marketplace of free stuff. Baby toys, cologne, lamps, framed art, boxes of books, old computer monitors. It’s fun because if you’re observant while you’re strolling around, you can find great stuff—for free. It’s also fun because you get evaluated on your stuff—we’ve left some chairs that got snatched right away, and we’ve left some art that did not. It’s sad when you see stuff on the sidewalk in the rain.
There’s always a lot of books. We live in a well-read neighborhood. Once I found and gifted my girlfriend a psychiatry textbook called “The Joy of Suffering.” I’ve skimmed a 1960s ad design review, Patton Oswalt’s memoir, volume 1 of modern Russian poetry, and a very outdated human resources and management textbook.
When I got back to the apartment one night, someone was using Wassily Kandinsky’s “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” as a doorstop. They must have found it in the box out front. The front door had been slamming on the book all day, which looked like it had been folded in half each direction at least a few times.