Freecycle: Find Out What Your Fellow Americans Have and Now Think You Might Want

There is a world around us we don’t see, but we can get a look at by email. A virtual curbside giveaway called Freecycle has claimed my inbox, each email a peephole into the life and times of my proximate America. I’m signed up for a regional list serve that serves up roughly fifty or more emails a day offering, for free, unwanted items around members’ houses to whomever first replies to claim them. It’s a kind of guerilla free trade that is more reality show than shopping channel, but it’s also a de facto underground community that calls to and binds up folks who are doing more than cleaning out their cupboards – each email says something about the sender and the receiver. What makes Freecycle magnetic is that each email tells you what your neighbors have, what they are now willing to part with, and what they believe is worth your while to get – even if it means driving several towns over to pick it up. That cost-benefit calculus is often dumfounding, depending on what is up for grabs.
Some will offer unwanted, unopened presents for re-gifting. Others genuinely want to recycle the plastic egg holder insert from the refrigerator. Some seek the outdated electronics another discards, and some use Freecycle as a daily discipline to declutter just about anything, but also to signal something of themselves by doing so. For others it is simply to know the joy of giving what someone else might genuinely use. Reading the emails is daily diverting and often poignant. The flurry of messages creates a kind of kinship among its fervent users, and inevitably among others who just observe the bazaar from the inbox, perhaps waiting for that one remarkable discard. Others, maybe me, are loathe to stop wetting their feet in the personal flotsam and jetsam of life that washes up with such riveting regularity.
Actually getting something from Freecycle is much more challenging than an EBay auction. With no stated end time for claiming an item, warp speed is of the eerie essence. I did try, respectively, for the four buckets of stone dust (bring your own buckets), and the doghouse-shaped boxed set of Peanuts books (for my brother), within the hour each was posted, only to find they were both taken within the minute, and that I was low down an already long waiting list. Freecyclers are voracious, and attentive, birds watching from the wire. Need, greed, and speed make this cast-off meta-market bafflingly successful and fascinating to monitor.
Some of my favorite freebies by any of the above criteria have been the One Large Bar of Ivory Soap (unopened), the Half Bag of Bouillon Cubes (chicken and beef assortment), and the Partially Used Tub of Pet Wipes. I would have had to spend more in gas to go get them than perhaps they were worth, but maybe someone else was closer. But the giveaway that seems destined to top anything noted or yet to be offered is something that came through yesterday, and I am not making this up. This was in America’s closet, not far from my house.

[FreecycleAct] Offer: Two adult size cryogenic freezer bags

These are high quality bags. We recently had my mom and my in-laws cryogenically frozen and you have to buy your own freezer bags so we bought the box of six thinking that it would be cheaper because they keep so long we could save the extras for ourselves eventually but we only ended up using three and now our EPSAs (Everlasting Preservation Savings Account) are in the tank with the rest of the economy and I don't think there's any way we'll be able to afford anything but the usual dirt hole. So we don't need these bags anymore. Actually I am using one of them to keep my suits in down in the basement because they are really airtight and keep the musty smell out. They have the high quality green seal on the ziplock closure, one side is blue and the other is yellow and if you make a good seal then it turns green. Also they are clear so I can still see my suits. Maybe they are translucent, I don't know the difference. They were clear enough to still see granny's face but not so clear that you could tell if the pennies on her eyes were heads or tails.

Anyway if you are thinking about cryogenic preservation you will need these and they are the good ones.

And they must have been the good ones, because they were gone within the hour.