22,000 and counting.

Since mid-November I have sold 22,000 Lite Brite pegs on eBay, all salvaged from the waste stream. I have 15,000 more bagged and ready to go. While counting and putting them into my little bubble wrap baggies (left over packaging I get from work) I feel strangely like a drug dealer, packaging my wares. A few friends are outraged that I actually count the pegs rather than weigh them. I guess I enjoy the process of counting them. I find pleasure in the simplest of activities. I feel it is part of my charm. I mean, I do accounting for a living if that is any indication. I like making order from chaos. I also spend much of my free time digging through pounds and pounds of garbage in hopes of finding treasure. I create little tiny pieces of art out of pieces of paper that I carefully cut and tear to the exact specifications I want. I prefer my movies with as little action as possible. I'm a simplistic girl. Above all that though I get immense pleasure from rummaging through what most consider to be garbage and finding a home for it. It's my own form of environmental activism.

I got started selling Lite Brite pegs in mass quite accidentally. An artist befriended me on eBay when he noticed that I was selling them. He offered me $15 per thousand and was willing to buy as many as I could find. For several years my mother and I both supplied him with thousands of pegs. Years ago, after not hearing from him in sometime I did a Google search of his name and found that he had died of AIDS. This is a picture he sent me once of a portrait he did of Buddha attaching 18 Lite Brite machines together. He also did portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and others. After he died I didn't have a big buyer for the pegs and got out of selling on eBay much but I just couldn't stop buying the pegs when I found them at Goodwill. That explains how I ended up with nearly 40,000 of them in my basement. But over half of them are now gone and I'm richer for it (or at least I was until I bought my cell phone, computer, printer/scanner/fax combo and digital camera). How great is it though to be able to look at these new items and know that they were funded by salvaging things from the landfill?