Seen on Filbert Street

A good use of dead wood.

Dreams of Steel

Anna and I have been fighting lately about bags and the fine line between garbage and adventure.

The way, I see it, Dreams of Steel was an act of divine inspiration. Three years ago one of the nuns next door asked me if she could have our old cans and beer bottles. It was for a field trip to Germany. A simple girl, a little bit worn, but like all of our neighborhood nuns, solid and clean as a bar of soap. Of course I said yes. The nuns work on missions here, teaching at the local school and they have a way of disappearing one day, as if abducted by aliens. After a year or so of trash segregation, that's what happened with our bottle collector. For a week I kept putting bottles in the milk crates she'd set aside for me, as though feeding an alley cat that had picked up and moved on. Then it was back to the deep blue recycling bin.

The nun told me she'd take the bottles and cans to the dump, for the nickel or eight cents or ten cents a pop. In Canada, where I grew up, we return bottles to a corner store. I can remember muggy summer afternoons spent trawling through ditches. I'd collect mossy bottles and then trade them in at the corner store for one more set of Star Wars collector cards, or gum or fudge. Here in the US we just throw them away or recycle them. I'd never thought of returning them in San Francisco.

I don't know what made me start, but sometime this summer I began sneaking cans into a black garbage bag in our basement. I didn't tell Anna about it. I didn't reflect. Just squish the aluminum cans with your foot and put them in the bag. What a divinely satisfying sound that is, to destroy something made of metal on the concrete floor. I remember this as my Dreams of Steel period (I didn't know it, but I was about to become mightily depressed) but if you could fairly call it anything, "fantasy of consumption," would be appropriate. In retrospect, I think maybe I saw drinking -- synecdoche for the nonstop consumption of this enterprise we call family -- as a way of somehow building something. The plan was simple: I'd take the $30 I'd eventually make from cans, invest that in some kind of wickedly clever investment scheme (penny stocks preferred) and presto: one fortune!

This idea of building something up from nothing via luck has been a lifelong obsession of mine. Here was my chance.

Only things didn't go quite as planned. Sometime around my third garbage bag, Anna clued in. There was discussion. Loving, but firm, she told me to move the cans out of doors, preferably into the recycling bin behind our house.

Even then, busted, I couldn't let go of Dreams of Steel. I moved the cans behind the house, peering nervously over the balcony as our new neighbor cleaned up the back yard. He wasn't going to take my cans away. Just to be safe, I moved them to the wall, to mark my ownership. Weeks were going by.

At this point, I had to confront another grim reality. I had no idea how or where to return these cans. I had lost all sense of how many cans there were in all these garbage bags, but clearly we were talking about a windfall in the $16 to $30 range. Thanksgiving was approaching and I was getting that crazy project that shall never be completed vibe from Anna. "No," I told myself, banishing all thoughts of Gigi's baby book, our cork collection and that very promising anthology of poems. "This thing is for real."

I chose the day after Thanksgiving to act, dubbing it. Dreams of Steel; Day of Action. Thanksgiving itself was devoted to eating and reconnaissance, learning the ins and outs of the California Refund Value system. Here's how it works: anyone can charge you money for your cans and bottles, but only a handful of select "recycling centers" can actually give you money back. I imagined something like a pop machine, but in reverse. 20 minutes of shoveling crushed cans and I'd be on my way to a fortune.

Islay,1, being the least likely to squawk, became my co-conspirator. We got up early, with the house still sleeping, and headed out to the park for a warm-up walk. Thanksgiving always draws a large number of homeless to our neighborhood to score free eats at the church next door and, inspired by their shopping carts and get-up-and-go, we shortened our walk and headed into the garage.

I put a cardboard box in the back of the car (I really had thought of everything) to cover my tracks and loaded her up with empties. The bags were like too-big discarded candy wrappers but the weight of them with all of those valuable cans felt fertile and good.

I should mention that it was more than the inspiration of my fellow man that put me and my two year-old in that car that day. There was also the matter of the mouse, who had been nibbling away at our trash for a few days before. This happens from time to time when you live next to a church. I like to think of their fall visits as a quaint seasonal occurrence, like pumpkins on doorsteps or the summer fog. But for Anna, they have a more squalid subtext and, given the unspoken tension beneath her recent Dreams of Steel discovery, there was a nastier vibe this time around.

"I want those cans out of here," she'd told me after surveying the ripped bag trimmed with torn garbage and mouse droppings. "They're attracting rats."

I'm still pretty sure we were only talking about mice, but let me get back to the shining moment of this whole enterprise: Me and Islay -- the genesis moment of a family legacy, perhaps? -- in the Subaru, backing out of the garage, heading to Cala Foods to cash in our booty. Islay is indiscriminate in her enthusiasm for car rides, whether we roll out of the garage or not, so she was the perfect co-conspirator. Happy and gurgling, we backed out of the garage into the damp sunlight.

After casing out Cala, we concluded that the can return had to be in the lower parking lot, and so we took the spiral ramp down and into a scene that was reminiscent of several choice Places You'd Not Want To Be Caught Dead In: county jails, third-world homes for the aged, Reno's Greyhound depot. Junky cars lurked in the darkness. Were those people living in them? At the back corner of the garage there was a line of maybe a dozen of the most broken people you could imagine standing in front of shopping carts. The wrong kind of laugh; a grey beard, unkempt; a stained blue jacket, unkempt as well. They looked like they'd been waiting forever. In front of them there was a bin and maybe a guy. I looked down at the trash gathered at the bottom of the ramp. There was a broken plastic bag of shit there, oozing out brown the size of a baby. I picked up Islay and left.

Maybe a post-Thanksgiving rush at recycling centers is traditional, I told myself. I'll come back during low season, whenever that is.

But there was to be no comeback for the Dream of Steel. After one more conversation, this one angry, with both Anna and I feeling that the other was somehow missing some fundamental sense of decency, I backed down and threw our future into the recycling bin behind our house. At first, it was like giving up on a living thing, but that feeling passed. Who knows, maybe letting go of an illusion.

A gas tax. Hell yes!

Driving home from Cisco last night, I passed a gas station: $1.95 a gallon. That's expensive, compared to the rest of America but cheap cheap cheap compared to the $4 or so I was paying in the summer. In fact, the steep drop in gas prices here in the U.S. has pretty much amounted to a multibillion dollar economic stimulus package for most Americans. A lot of that money we were previously spending on gas, we can now spend on other stuff, those of us who still have jobs, anyway.

But now we're supposed to be spending money on bailing out an auto industry which, through its own short-sightedness and inefficiency has build a strong market-based argument to be left alone over the past decade. Of course this being America, we're not talking about ways to actually pay for this bailout, just whether or not we should do the bailout. As if we could deficit finance our way out of any problem.

If things were really that easy, we wouldn't actually have any economic problems. Everyone talks as though the US could just borrow indefinitely, but that's not really the case. The Treasury can print all the money it wants, but at some point, people will lose confidence and simply stop taking it. So we'll have to print more, while watching it become worth less. Now this is a great way to inflate away with a massive debt, but it's also a wonderful way to ruin the world's strongest economies and destroy the savings of everyday Americans. Who knows how close we are to all of this. If we've learned one thing over the past few months it's that no one really understands these complex global financial systems. Every disaster comes as a complete shock to our economic oracles.

Much as it was previously taboo to suggest market intervention and now taboo to suggest laissez faire, there is a prohibition in the us against talking about raising the money to pay for any of this profligacy. But I'm going to suggest it anyway: If we're going to bail out the auto industry, why not do it via a gas tax? Let that money back whatever loans we make to the auto industry. If they pay it back, introduce a gas rebate to make it even cheaper (when it heads to the inevitable $4 a gallon range again). Make the people who buy the biggest cars and drive the most miles pay the most for this bailout that not everybody wants. Give people a choice to not pay for the bailout by driving less.

Of course it'll never happen. The Democrats have been too bullied and frightened into ever suggesting anything approximating fiscal responsibility. Imagine! That anyone would ever actually have to pay for anything. Tax and spend bad. Borrow and spend good.

But you think that with all these countless hours of debate on this bailout that someone would be at least talking about ways to pay for it.