TSUSFTAOHD*

*The Secret Underground Society for the Appreciation of Hotdogs

Yesterday I took a load of junk to the dump.

When you enter the premises of the dump you drive up on a little scale-bridge. You hop out of your vehicle and go up to the window of the little house that is by the scale. Ideally they weigh it with your truck full, then you unload it, and then stop by another scale and anther little office, where they weight your vehicle again, and charge you for the amount of a load that left your truck since last weighed,

That has always been that way but things are always changing, this time the lady at the “before” scales said that would be $8. I suppose she had a tare weight for my truck. It is always $7 or $8. The plan was just a little bit different, that’s all. Change is the only thing constant.

As I was shelling out the money out my wallet I got a closer look inside the window on her desk. She had two delicious looking chilidogs with chopped raw onions on top in front of her. I was delaying her getting a hold of those hotdogs.

I asked, “Are those Martin hotdogs?”

The reason I asked was that there is a Martin’s just around the corner on Powder Springs Road and I have been thinking of trying out their hotdogs.

“No, they are Varisty hotdogs.” She said.

The clouds or the sun or something shifted which caused the window reflection to disappear. I could see there were two other women in the office, they each had hotdogs in front of them.

That reminded me when I worked at the Atlanta Post Office at the Federal Annex in the center of the city. Almost every night a man from the workroom floor would make a Varsity Hotdog run. I think management looked the other way, because surely it took longer than the 30 minute lunch period to go to the Varsity on North Avenue and back. I remember when he brought those red and white Varsity boxes you could just tell those dogs were sweating and marinating in their own body fluids. Yum!

I asked the lady have they ever tried Brandy’s Hotdogs above the hospital. No, she said. I told her the chili was very good and very spicy. She seemed interested.


I left the weighing station and drove towards the big building that you dumb your junk or trash into. A man at the first entrance waved for me to stop and asked if I had any metal in the load. Yes, I did. Most of it was metal. He pointed a big pile of bikes, refrigerators, stoves, pipes, and other metal things and told me to dump my metals there and come back, which I did.


Inside, I backed up beside to a truck with an elderly man dumping house siding. He was finely dressed in a well tailored suit.. He was wearing work gloves that didn’t match his suit. I suspect he didn’t get a speck of dirt or a smudge or any kind on that nice suit.

On the other side of me was the building’s inside wall. I didn’t noticed when I backed in but as I was getting in back into the truck I glanced over and saw a big black stuffed bear looking at me. It looked sad. Then I refocused and saw a long row of human-size stuff animals lined up. They looked strange – like something in a horror movie. I think there was a long bench and all the characters were arranged on the bench. They looked like the giant stuff animals people win at carnival games.

Apparently, some of the workers or prisoners decided to make their jobs a little more entertaining by arranging these creatures along the wall and it caught on.

It seemed all the human-size stuffed animals were looking at me and smiling with dirty faces.** I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

** of course they had dirty faces, they were all pulled out from the dirty dump.