Buy My Crap

What is it about garage sales that brings out the drooling idiot in people?
   This weekend is the Come-One, Come-All Yard Sale Extravaganza* in my mother's neighborhood. No permit needed, just toss your junk out on the lawn, sit beside it in a lawn chair, and wait for the quarters to roll in. And the morons.
   A street is only so wide and only so long, right? Which means there are a finite number of cars that can fit in front of any single house at any single time. Yet my mother's neighborhood is packed to the rafters with people who want to ignore the laws of physics and cram just one more automobile into a space already full of them.
   What about car doors? They're not going to close by themselves, you know. And if there are already too many cars on the street, if people on both sides open their doors all the way then nobody gets through.
   And let's talk about the merchandise. Things. Stuff. Garbage. It's the same from yard to yard to yard. Baby clothes and other dirty laundry, dusty books, battered coffee tables, and old tube TVs. Maybe a full-length mirror or two thrown in for good measure. Seriously, if you've been to one driveway you really have been to all of them, the only thing that changes is the nature of the musty smell, which varies from old-man to cat-lady to chain-smoker.
   Some houses were doing a brisk business even this morning, and I wonder where all the junk they're selling actually goes. Time was I suspected it all ended up on eBay, but eBay is now just an equally-crooked version of Craig's List where everything is retail-priced, no room for the little guy. Maybe flea markets? A hoarder's front bedroom? A lean-to in the back woods? Maybe it's all packed up and shipped over to China so they can learn the value of Western over-buying and clutter?
   I know some people haunt garage sales in search of that one elusive find, the Thing Of Value the seller doesn't know he has in-hand. Like a mint condition Action Comics #1 or a Tiffany Lamp that the buyer could get for a song and sell for a fortune. Which means that most people rummaging through someone else's junk this weekend are secretly burglars who want to take advantage of the unsuspecting. Think about it. All these nosey people should be wearing masks and horizontally-striped shirts like the Hamburglar.
   Now that would be funny...


* I made up that name, it's not what the city calls it. But they should, don't you think?