I slept a bit better last night than I had the previous several. I still awoke several times in the middle of the night for a while, but always managed to get back to sleep. I'm not out of the proverbial woods yet; maybe I never will be. But I think I can say, without injecting too much ego or self-delusion, that maybe, just maybe, I'm finally learning to ride these waves and navigate them with some success.

Manic depression. It is my illness. It is my disease. It is my gift.

Though I am again feeding myself a steady diet of nightly lithum of my own prescribed dosage, I was glad I was able to sleep without one of those awful blue pills. I would have if absolutely necessary, but I strongly prefer to avoid them.

This morning, I woke up early before 0700, and contemplated plans for the day. It is the weekend. When one does not have a regular job, weekends become almost indistinguishable from other days. But now that I have something resembling a job whose schedule almost resembles a normal work week, I am again able to experience this dichotomy of operating modes.

I decided that now was as good a time as any to begin investigating something I had been contemplating ever since reading this FAQ. I wasn't sure what I would find, but for the fun of it, I set out on foot.

My first instinct was to take a more careful look behind the local Safeway, within very easy walking distance. As I scouted around, I was disappointed to see that they had a compactor whose only opening faced the inside of the building. The setup was the same as the King Soopers where I used to work. And I bet they put just as much perfectly edible food into it too. What a horrid way to waste.

I scouted some more, and saw a few other dumpsters behind a some of the other stores in the litle shopping center. I peeked into one, and didn't see much of anything. There was another one, but I didn't go up to it because there was a moving truck parked near it, and people moving things in and out of it. Best to be as discreet as possible.

I returned home. When I got there, the door was locked. I hadn't bothered to carry my keys with me. Mom must have woken up and locked it. I thought about knocking, but decided I may as well head out and look around some more. All of my senses were primed at peak sensitivity. The world was my RPG.

Walking along the bike path out next to Wadsworth, I began to notice just how much trash was scattered around it. Not enough to draw your attention if you weren't looking for it, but it was everyhere. Paper cups in the grass. Empty bags of chips. Candy wrappers. An old piece of notebook paper floating in a tiny puddle in the middle of the path.

Wait a second. I bent over to examine the paper. Ripped from a three ring binder, it had standard college ruling in little blue lines. There was also something written in pencil. I picked it up.

I couldn't make out the words, because the water made the paper almost totally transparent. I held it in front of me in the sun, fanning it around the hopes of drying it out. I continued down the bike path, continuing to hold the stray paper in a position where it could dry.

Then, as I came up near the 7-Eleven, I noticed something. The dumpster cage behind it, enclosed in a wood fence, did not appear to be locked. But this one was sitting out in open view of the whole parking lot. Granted, there wasn't a whole lot of traffic just yet, but what if someone was watching? Self-consciousness threatened to make me turn away.

Now or never.

I went up to the little enclosure, and peered in through the fence. Indeed, I was able to open it ajar with a fair degree of ease. The dumpster was overflowing with boxes, to the degree that some were piled up outside it in the enclosure. There wasn't going to be enough room for me to even get in.

I looked at one of the boxes full of junk that was sitting in easy reach, and dug my hand around in it. It didn't take long.

The first thing I found were several unopened packages of yellow duck-shaped marshmellow deserts. On the health scale, these have got to rank somewhere near the bottom, but they would be sweet, and provide a bit of a sugar rush. I took 3 of them.

As I continued to paw around in the same box. my next find were some paper-wrapped english muffin sandwiches with egg and sausage. I wasn't sure I was going to want to eat those, but I pulled out two of them. They looked decent enough.

Had I continued, I probably could have found more stuff, but my hands were full. I hadn't brought a backpack or anything to put them in. After all, this had initially just been planned as a scouting mission. Besides, the longer I stood there outside the dumpster fence with my hand digging behind it, the more likely someowne would spot me. (A random question to ponder: What might they do if they did?)

In keeping with the guidelines of dumpster diving ethics, I took only what I was going to use, and left plenty behind for the next person.

Carrying away my handfulls of goodies, I probably would have looked conspicuous to anyone who might have been paying attention, but if there were any such people, I myself wasn't paying enough attention to notice them.

A block away, back at the apartment complex, I sat down on the curb. First I opened one of the marshmellow packages. Aside from the normal health risks that would also be true when buying such manufactured fluff from any retail outlet, I had no qualms about eating these. I ate a couple of them, and then went on to the muffin sandwiches.

These would have somewhat more nutritional value, but there was more potential for food poisoning from possibly rotten meat or eggs. The expiration date on the label said Wednesday. Three days ago. However, based on their location in the dumpster, I would have bet they were just put out last night.

Even if they had been put out earlier that that, they would have been well refridgerated due to the unseasonable cold weather of the past few days.

I took the sandwich apart, examined the bread, smelled the egg, and sniffed the meat. It seemed ok. With the sandwich in half, I took one bite out of the egg part, and one bite from the bun with the meat. I wrapped the rest of it back up, jammed my treasures into my overflowing pockets, and continued walking. I held the paper I had found out in front of me again to dangle, letting it dry a bit more.

Several minutes passed, and I didn't feel sick yet.

I found a nice place to sit near a stream, yards away from the sidewalk where Dover St intersects at a right angle with 104th.

I put the paper on a rock in the sun, and proceeded to eat the rest of my first sandwich. The first sandwich I have ever eaten that has come out of a dumpster. It tasted pretty decent, considering. I also finished the first little package of marshmellow ducks, and took off back toward the apartment.

Upon entering the parking lot, I rememberd what I was missing. The discarded paper! I ran back to retrieve it.

When I picked it up, it was dry enough that I could make out almost all the words. Even before it dried, I had guessed the handwriting to be grade school or junior high level. I wasn't wrong.

As I started to read the words, I concluded that it had been well worth my effort to notice, pick up, and restore to legibility this discarded fragment. Thankfully, this was no dry page of notes from some lecture about the Civil War. This was something personal. Who needs manufactured entertainment when there is this?

I took a gleeful pleasure in the voyeurism of it. As I read, it became clear that there was not one author, but two. Context is everything. I could easily see the words being written as this paper was passed back and forth between desks while some teacher droned on in the background.

Unfortunetaly, I am not allowed to redistribute the content of the paper here. In order to do so legally, I would need to obtain a license from the copyright holder(s). As of this moment, I have no such license. Therefore, I am prohibited from reproducing this work in any form or media whatsoever.

I folded the paper up, and placed it in my pocket.

On my way back out of the grass next to the stream, I took the time to pick up every piece of trash I could find. I carried them to the nearest dumpster, and made a deposit, thus ensuring my karmic balance. Make a withdrawl from one dumpster, and a deposit in another. This is the way of life.

I didn't want to take my dumpster food with me back into the apartment. Why? Well, trust me. My mother really does not need to know about any of this. Questions are more easily avoided when there is nothing to ask.

I hid the rest of my food underneath the front bumper of dear little Tobias. Then I returned to the apartment door and knocked.

It took a number of attempts before my mom came to the door and answered. She had awakened earlier, figured I had left (or entered?), locked the door, and gone back to sleep. With drowsy eyes, she was surprised to see it was I who was knocking, and let me back in.

Thus concludes today's lesson in urban survival.

I suppose that in the eyes of some, the fact that I would go hunting in a dumpster for food when I not only have money to buy my own, but also two parents who are willing to provide it, would indicate that I am mentally ill, and ought to be hospitalized.

Obviously, I see it differently. To me, what I did was no more crazy than people who venture out into the middle of the woods to learn how to survive for days or weeks on little or no supplies.

There are many institutions which teach classes on Wilderness Survival. Why not Urban Survival? In this day and age, such a skill would be far more likely to have practical application. Depending on how the big broken machine behaves during the next few years, I might become truly thankful that I started figuring it out now.

A class on urban survival. Just think of it. They could teach not only dumpster diving, but squatting, how to negotiate a barter, panhandling(?), and maybe shoplifting. (That last one is a huge question mark, because it would make it much more likely to draw the ire of law enforcement. If such a thing is taught, it should be accompanied by a crash course in human ethics. There is a difference between what is legal, what is moral, and what is practically expedient. These three areas frequently overlap, but not always.)

I would envision the final exam in such a course would be to take the students to a strange city, and drop them off either individually or in small groups. No cash, no credit cards, no identification, no social security card or other means of acquiring legal employment. Maybe they could be given a change of clothes and a small bag of random items to start with. The students would then have figure out how to survive for at least a week, or even better, a month.

On my way over to the Neighborly Abode, I stopped at 7-11 and bought something. I chose a bottle of spicy V-8 to wash down my second sandwich. I had sworn to myself that I would patronize the first business where I found a dumpster with food. It's a little bit like how I enjoy ordering cds from bands make ther mp3 music available for download. Reward the do-gooders.

(I'm not necessarily implying that the 7-11 corporation is a do-gooder. I just found some food in their dumpster. That is all.)

Now, I shall prepare for the next phase of my day: Journeying to Boulder. I think I'll spend at least a decent portion of the afternoon at the public library. But the main attraction, planned for this evening, will involve witnessing a dramatic portrayal of what I consider to be one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century. I look forward to seeing how they do it.

My weekend is underway.