State of Sales

I'm a yard-sale junkie. Yard sales, garages sales, rummage sales, you name it.


Estate sales are the most telling. Everything someone once owned at "name your price" deals. I enjoy them most because you can see how the former owners lived; it's almost intimate. You see their photos, taste in clothes, music, art, where they ate and slept, all the clues about their worldly life.

Plus there's usually a treasure waiting to be found. Something that makes me laugh or smile, or a child's toy I too once owned, or a book I've read- something that makes me feel a connection to these people. Sometimes a real find like an old book. My own tastes are so random that finding something is easy.

But there's something nasty about estate sales. That the possessions that defined someone mean so little and go for pennies once the people have gone. That all that they leave behind are knick-knacks and junk that people will haggle over. They sadden me because one day, this will happen to my things, in my home.


In a way, I look forward to that day and it makes me wish I believed in an afterlife where I could watch as a spirit or ghost. Watch people look an awe at my bizarre collection of curios, like a civil war cannonball next to a silver spoon (sooo waiting for someone to ask about that so I can say "there is no spoon"), next to a coffin nail with my age engraved on it. See people laugh a random object, like my photo album of B/W snapshots of Yellowstone Park from the 1950s. View people's eyes widen at my stairwell, mixed with mementos of my favorite films, music, and the like and weapons ranging from swords to axes to more exotic hand-to-hand objects de mortis. I wonder how many people will try to figure out who I was or what kind of person I was or whether they met me at some point.


Estate sales are why I stopped caring about my future. Knowing that everything I do leave behind will eventually be divided up and sold to the highest bidder? Ha, why worry about it?
I live for my amusement, my enjoyment, me. And right now, I'm laughing my ass off ;-P