The Best Things in Life Are Free

Updated 7 years ago, May 8, 2018

When you’re trying to unload your crap on the internet, you have basically two options: eBay or Craigslist. With the former, the man takes a portion of your profits, while the latter you get the satisfaction of having no paper trail. The Craigslist experience is also much more enthralling. Rather than sitting safely inside your house, waiting days for your package to arrive in the mail, you get the pleasure of making arrangements to meet up at the McDonald’s five miles away to avoid the possibility of being stabbed during the exchange. Alternately, there is always the high adrenaline direct option of going to the person’s house à la trick-or-treat style. The greatest gift of the “for sale” portion of the site is hands down the free stuff – useless shit nobody in their right mind would buy.

I’ve recently begun perusing the site every few days and have already pursued free stuff a couple of times. The first occasion was an attempt to get Christmas lights. Rather than meeting in person, a man dropped off a trash bag full of semi-functioning Christmas lights on his way to work. He hid them behind the apartment sign near my building and then emailed me this news from his Blackberry. The second time was an upright piano. The family paid for the rental of a U-Haul truck; my friends and I had only needed to go to their house and help load the monstrous thing. They even already had moved the piano onto their front porch for us. This gesture prevented us from going inside and feeling the need about the possibility of being stabbed. Soon the dad returned from the truck rental location and decided to maneuver the truck in reverse across his front lawn. As he inched closer and closer to the house, we yelled collectively for him to stop but it was too late as we watched, in a mixture of horror and hilarity, the gutter tumble to the ground. I bit my tongue that day trying to dam the laughter.

The other day I began to notice a trend of the free items listed on the site. Or rather, I’ve noticed one item in particular pop up quite frequently – dirt. Typically listed under the title of “FREE FILL DIRT”, a man with a pickup truck could amass literally tons of the stuff. Sometimes you get lucky and the dirt owner will deliver, however the radius of delivery is usually rather limited. Currently in my area there are twenty-six listings for this earthy gift. If one decided to begin gathering all of this free dirt, his options would be limitless. He could open his own dirt bike trails, or spray paint it white and have “snow” year-round, or merely add water to instantly become the owner of the world’s largest mud wrestling pit. The possibilities are endless. A little bit of creativity and you could own the world. Someone just needs to take the initiative.