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Stumpage Reports
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Monday, March 08, 2004 :::
The Garage Sale Vikings
I had been wanting to go on a Saturday morning garage sale jaunt with my friends Jack and Peter for several months now. I used to work every Saturday, and the last several Saturdays I'd been busy with the Real, Live, Actual Girl. But she was working last Saturday and I gleefully told Jack I could accompany them. In his clipped, midwestern with a touch of New Joisey accent, Jack read off the rules:
1. Since our trucks only seat two, we'll have to take your car. (Okay)
2. Unless you want us shrieking at you "No! No! Turn there! No, don't park there!! We'll never get out! Faster! Faster! You fool! You fool!" you'll have to let Peter Andretti drive your car. (Okay)
3. We're meeting at my place at 5:30 AM. (What the fuck?!? ... okay).
These guys had done their planning. First sale was at 6 AM and we hit that about 5:50 and it was total shit. Although there was a pretty tacky picture of MLK Jr. on the back wall of the garage, not for sale. We spent the next 45 minutes scoping out the locations of the 7 AM sales and figuring out the best routes. (I quickly realized red lights don't matter in Raleigh at 6:30 AM on a Saturday). As we whizzed about in the pre-dawn darkness we saw other people doing the same thing, and Jack and Peter said things like "There's that fuck in the red Nissan we saw last weekend." We would pull up to curb, often leave the car running, and ascend on the sale like a horde of Vikings, minus the raping and pillaging. We hit about 6 or 8 sales between 6 AM and 8:30 AM. It was shit as far shopping goes. Both my companions announced it was the worst garage sale day this year. But we had fun and a good breakfast afterwards. The bounds of decency prevent me from revealing topics of conversation.
Quote of the Day:
But the freight had to be paid. John Barleycorn began to collect, and he collected not so much from the body as from the mind. The old long sickness, which had been purely and intellectual sickness, recrudesced. The old ghosts, long laid, lifted their heads again. But they were different and more deadly ghosts. The old ghosts, intellectual in their inception, had been laid by sane and normal logic. But now they were raised by the White Logic of John Barleycornm and John Barleycorn never lays the ghosts of his raising. For this sickness of pessimism, caused by drink, one must drink further in quest of the anodyne that John Barleycorn promises but never delivers.
--- Jack London, John Barleycorn, 1913.
::: posted by tom at 10:05 AM
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