I've tried positing in this thread 4 times now. Various errors have killed my posts and my spirit. I should have posted in that "I'm a dumb cunt" thread today.
So, no more stories, just a list of what I've gotten out of dumpsters:
1. Great furniture, pretty cool art, old-school office furniture (oak desks, metal flat files), obsolete graphic design stuff like rub-off letters and technical pens.
2. Industrial design objects: (1) a 3' x 3' blue cube sign that used to hang in one of the subway stations here. It was lit from within and said "Addfare" in a great font. Asked around, picked it up from its new home in a junkyard. Did a little wiring. Now I have a blue, luminescent endtable. (2) I used to walk past one of the old bus yards in the city. One of the busted-down busses had a destination sign that said "Nowhere in Particular." On pre-digital busses they used these long rolls of printed super-plastic that would rotate to show the next stop/destination/w/e. (Watch Dirty Harry to see a perfect example of this bus.) The printing company had included "Nowhere in Particular" right after "Fillmore St, Webster St., etc." I still want to know the story behind that. Got that one on my wall.
3. Basic vegetarian dumpster food in the 90s: MY friend Greg rode across the US on a beat-up clunker bike in the late-80s. He had a sack of lentils on one side of his rear rack, and a bag of oatmeal on the other. And about $20 for the trip. KFC was his grail. They threw out bags of biscuits at the end of the day. And when they made cole-slaw, they'd throw away about 2/3s of the outer leaves. When he came back, he took me under his wing like a great teacher.
4. Best high-end gourmet dumpster diving: SF has a lot of expensive restaurants. The food's usually good but the prices are ridiculous. I found this fancy-ass restaurant in my old neighborhood where they'd knocked down tons of artists/small business spaces to build lofts. (Yeah, mine among them.)
But the dotcom thing crashed so there were all of these restaurants, stocked to the gills with tuna tartare and blood-orange/lotus reductions but no customers. I was walking past one of these places and I see a dumpster OVERFLOWING with what looked like really good bread.
Some of the kitchen staff were outside and I recognized my old friend Guillermo from a restaurant we both used to work at. We say hey, hug, then he smiles and asks, "Want some free Acme bread? Go crazy!" I'm like, "Holy shit! What's the deal? This bread looks perfect." (Acme bakes incredible French and italian bread. $4/loaf) "They throw it out every day because it'll go stale. Come by every day." They threw out some amazing cheeses too (and they were wrapped). I ate very well for a few months for free.
After a while, as a gesture of thanks, i started bringing by blunts of very, very nice outdoor Mendo weed. After that, they'd give me bottles of waiter wine. You know, the bottles that contain the leftovers from the bottles that the customers haven't finished. The customers, most of whom were on expense account) ordered very good wine. That's still some of the best wine I've ever had the opportunity of drinking. Good times.
Junk food 
