Celebrated Summer

Holy crap, it's September!

I thought this blog was going to be chock full of photos of flea market finds and road trip stories from this summer. After all, we had it figured out this year -- the kids had places to be, I had solo work-time built into my days, and business was good. So it was gonna be time to head out and pick!

Well, I did do some grubbing, and hit a few amazing sales -- not nearly as many as I'd planned. Large swaths of my solo time became kid-time, or sleep-in-after-band-practice-ran-late time. Not only has the band I'm in started writing and recording, and playing some shows again, after a long layoff, but I impulsively jumped back into writing and performing standup comedy, something I hadn't done since 2003.

Even more than all that, I think, was a real wake-up call about the amount of unlisted, unsorted crap we already own. I have literally thousands of books and LPs that are in no order whatsoever, all of which need listed. I have CDs, video games, cassettes, clothing... barely-sorted piles of stuff, enough to keep me listing for years. Literally. Years.

I did buy some stuff. At one sale in northeast Ohio, I went back twice and filled the trunk of my wife's car with media stuff, lots of out of print goodies and rarities. (This was also the sale where I bumped up against the limits of my 9-year-old's tolerance for picking -- after 90 minutes in a sweltering former department store, digging through disheveled piles of stuff and dodging throngs of shoppers, he lost it quickly when I tried to add some yard sales to the itinerary. Mental note: he may act 40 most of the time, but he's still nine.)

And I bought a lot online, too, picking up collections of computer stuff to part out, grabbing bulk lots, even buying some piles of records and things from friends of mine who were downsizing or short on cash. There was still a good influx of stuff, and while I'm still not where I'd like to be on my goal of 150 new listings a week, we're getting closer all the time. (This past Saturday, for example, I 'clocked out' from all other responsibilities and got 105 unique items up in one day - lots of them have already moved).

So why I haven't I been writing? Well, for one, there just hasn't been the time. Little things that seem like minor bumps in the road -- my printer dying this week, for example -- seem to become stumbling blocks that get us behind on shipping, then behind on listing, and then frantically trying to catch up basic housework and litter box maintenance.

And then there's the one big truth of this business that sends a lot of otherwise eager Ebayers running for the door after the first few weeks. Right now, concentrating on listing boxes of VHS tapes and old books and the like, I may find some valuable, "holy grail" titles. But none of it is glamorous, or weird, or unique. I don't get the satisfaction of photographing and making a blog entry out of, say, an Ohio Sauerkraut Festival ball cap, like I do when I'm out every weekend finding more odd things. The stuff I've been listing this summer, by and large -- the stuff paying the bills -- has been solid, unsexy inventory. I've kept the kids fed in large part with $4.99 books and nearly-forgotten "new old stock" CDs from long-defunct punk rock bands.

It's the grind of listing dozens of such solid, but unremarkable items that can bore people right out of business. I usually get in a zone with it, where I've got coffee, good music, the windows open, and if I start getting bleary-eyed about it, I stop myself and remind myself that THIS -- this busy work I'm doing in my house, in pajama pants, with Kreator blasting on the stereo -- is my job. This is "going to work" for me. That nearly always gets me over any slump.

Sales are creeping upward and staying there, the warehouse gradually looks more and more organized (the big CD shelves shown in the last update are almost full; I'm hoping to have another identical set built on the opposite wall this month). If I can keep this train rolling, keep up the music and comedy, get a little more writing time shoehorned in to my schedule, and maybe -- just maybe -- get the hell out of the house every couple Saturdays to plunder the countryside -- things will stay awesome. No complaints at all, at the moment.

Rack 'em up

This is what 13 feet by 10 feet of wall space looks like when it's been devoted entirely to CD shelving. I estimate I can get 5,700 CDs on these shelves without crowding them at all. Everything up here so far is alphabetized and sorted by selling platform, but I still have quite a bit to shelve.

This is the first step, hopefully the pivotal moment where we go from a disheveled, disorganized one-man flea circus to a well-honed order-spittin' machine. Even with some of the stock still in boxes, pulling orders today was amazingly fast, and having everything up and on display like this lets me know at a glance what I'm overstocked on and what I could shift to another platform or mark down to clear out.

Very psyched right now. Psyched and exhausted. Two tubs of orders packed, house relatively clean, and a whole lot more of life in the proper place than we've had before. This week should see a lot more get done. I'm looking forward to it.

Farmers and fishermen

I had a pretty good day today selling lots of little items. Individually, they're the kind of poky, un-sexy $3.99 sales that make people wonder why anyone would waste the effort to do this at all. Collectively, they made a nice pile of cash at great margins, and cleared out some space.

I was plowing through a box of VHS tapes tonight (I know, you hear about all my most glamorous work here). I sorted them by price - $1.99, $3.99 and then a small stack of the good ones, the out-of-print titles that will go for a bit more. As I was putting up the $3.99 stack, it occurred to me that it might take a year and a half for some of these to sell. A lot of the stuff I sold today had sat for months before moving. That's not a problem, necessarily. Though you don't want that shelf time to be TOO long, and Ebay seems hell-bent on getting sellers to jettison stale inventory, the fact is that when selling this kind of stuff, perishability isn't really a factor.

So some other random night of work back in 2008 or 2009 paid the bills today. The movies I list tonight will buy groceries in 2011 or 2012, more than likely. For some reason, the analogy of a farmer planting crops popped into my head, and I liked it. It's not an exact science, of course - I can't say "the work I do today will pay off on August 14, 2011." A few of these will sell in the next week, and a few will never sell at all. But overall the idea seems to hold - a lot of mid-grade stuff gets added to that churning beast we call our live inventory, and a year later, someone's gadding about on Ebay thinking of this old Allan Ladd western they used to watch as a kid, and bingo - four more bucks in pocket.

When Ebay was all finite auctions, my job was more like that of a fisherman. I went out on the water, I cast my bait, and they bit or they didn't. It was a much more immediate thing. I remember literally waking up on Sunday morning with no food in the house, wondering how my auctions were gonna close that night and hoping the winners paid instantly. (Things were a bit different, and a little lower to the ground, in my life then.)

With the fixed price, listed-till-sold format, it's more like farming. You plant it today, and chances are it won't bear fruit for some time -- so you gotta plant EVERY day, and do everything you can to make sure there are no gaps along the way, so that yor future self doesn't miss a meal.

Do I carry analogies too far?

In non-work news, we've had my Nana visiting us this week -- she's my wife's grandma but my family and hers were always close, and Nana was "Nana" to me when I was a kid, too. She's 86 now and pretty out of touch, even when she's lucid, which is becoming a sadly rare state. She keeps asking me what I'm doing with all these books and CDs and things, and I keep trying to tell her. But the whole idea of people buying things on the internet, paying online, and me shipping goods around the world, seems to trip a circuit breaker in her mind. She keeps asking me who's at the warehouse letting customers in to shop when I'm at home with her.

We're having a party this weekend, and then she's going home, and then next week our summer vacation plans -- including babysitting for my newly-minted fourth grader -- kick in. It feels like I haven't had any extended solitude or work time in months, even though it's only been a week. I have so much good new stuff to put up, and I also need to prepare for a sidewalk sale I'm holding with a friend at his record store on the 12th. I'd love to blow out a bunch of the old clearance-bin CDs and stuff there, and walk away with some cash. If it works well, we may make it a monthly thing.

Lastly, I gotta mention the hagglers which seem to be popping up like toadstools all the sudden. The one guy, I kinda get - I put a rare movie up for $100, he offered something like $40, I countered with $75, he counter-countered at $50, I said $56, he split. Seems silly to me to walk away over six bucks, but I'm okay with that, and I do think the movie will sell for $100 or close to it at some point.

But this other guy! I had an out-of-print gospel tape up for $12. He offers me $5, so I counter with $8. In reply, I get this lengthy diatribe about how he won't pay that because cassette tapes are a "dead format" and "no one ever buys them." So at $5, it was a desirable object, and for three dollars more, the entire format makes you angry by its mere existence? Bizarre.

Time to quick yakking and put up more of these videos. And if you were wondering, yes, VHS videos still sell too. Just plant 'em deep and don't expect them to feed you any time real soon.

Hear That Lonesome Whistle

When I was in college, my friend Lesley lived in some random falling-down bungalow, the kind of house so crappy that if actual poor people lived in it, there'd be a stink, so they rent it out to college kids instead. It had the added attraction of being right across the street from some train tracks, which were actively used at the time. (The line has since been torn out, and there's talk of a bike trail.) I asked her how she endured the noise, and she told me the same thing everyone tells you when they live near train tracks -- that the first night you think you're going to die or something, but that you quickly get used to it.

I'm in a small northeast Ohio town right now, one that seems to have been stuck on the map like a push-pin for the sole purpose of holding down freight tracks. Trains roll through on a regular basis all night long, a block or so away, horns wailing, bells clanging, wheels squealing on the metal tracks. You can sometimes hear the shouted voices of workers over the din. I soak it in, here in the middle of the night, although it's not why I'm awake. It doesn't bother me, but it doesn't let my mind rest, either.

I've always been a night owl. I've had a fascination my whole life with the nighttime world -- not ghosts-and-goblins bullshit, but the real work that goes on when everyone else is asleep. I used to sneak out of my house at night and walk around the streets of my hometown, or ride my beat-up three-speed bike from one end of town to the other. Once, when I had a crush on a girl I met at someone's graduation party, I rode out to the highway exit, then onto the divided state route, five or ten miles down to Uhrichsville, then cruised the streets there, forlornly wondering if this mystery girl would just happen to be looking out a random window when my stupid ass pedaled by. I may have seen one car the entire time.

I was always in and out of the few convenience stores and diners we had that were open all night. It's a wonder no one ever called the cops on me. (Actually, one night when I persuaded my friend Matt to ride bikes with me in the middle of the night, we did get "pulled over" in the Bag-n-Save parking lot; we ended up with three squad cars and a thorough third degree because someone a mile away had broken someone else's window with a rock. One cop tailed us all the way back to Matt's, driving his squad car at our speed, a block behind us, with his headlights off.)

Rock throwing wasn't my thing, though. Other than a few juvenile ad-sign-letter-alterings and the occasional changing of an old school metal gasoline price sign, I crept around and observed. I liked seeing the newspaper trucks tossing bundles onto sidewalks, and see the Wonder Bread truck pull up and make its deliveries. I liked riding down the main street in town, on a long flat straightaway, and not seeing a single pair of headlights. It was like the city was on autopilot, ticking and whirring like a cooling engine in the driveway, and that its mechanical workings in the dark were a secret for me and a select few others.

When I stayed home, I'd get up and put my headphones on, and creep through the AM dial on my little Emerson portable radio, listening to these all-night DJ's talking to people on the phone, arguing about politics or exhorting the nonbelievers. I could get one or two New York stations, including WCBS, and I remember being astonished by that fact. In the heady, pre-internet days of modems and BBS's, I'd rack up horrific long distance bills logging on to bulletin boards around the country, posting messages, seeing if anyone anywhere was awake like me, marveling at how these systems whirred and clicked and ran even when no one was paying attention but me.

It's not as fun now, of course. Mainly because I'm old now and I know why everyone else is asleep at this time of night. But it's also because staying up is almost...well... kinda passe. You can go to Wal-Mart or McDonald's at four in the morning. At least a few of your Facebook friends are always gonna be awake, or you'll know someone in Australia or Germany that you can chat with. Cable stations may go to real estate scam infomercials, but they don't play the National Anthem at a sensible hour and then sign off and leave you to your own devices.

I had a unique time and place to explore insomnia. I got to grow up in a town where they rolled up the proverbial sidewalks at nine, but it was a place where a kid stupid enough to ride his bike around alone at 3am (with Walkman blaring, likely as not) wasn't as likely to be beaten and robbed. I kinda had the run of the place, me and the delivery guys and and AM radio jocks, and the bleary-eyed lady in the blue smock at Lawson's flipping through Penthouse Forum and drinking stale coffee. Whatever arcane mysteries of the small hours there were, we had to ourselves.

The junkman thing requires me to get up early - specifically, in about three hours. A lot of times, just HAVING a set wake-up call is enough to keep me from getting to sleep. I'll worry myself right into a self-fulfilling prophecy of oversleep and/or an ass-dragging day. But no one seems willing to start a yard sale or a flea market at noon. And while my daughter got my good sleepin'-in genes and will snooze till lunchtime if you let her, my son is invariably up by 7:30, ready for anything, be it cereal and cartoons or a long morning of sales.

So when I'm out later this morning, full of coffee and home fries and ill humor, trying to get in the zone and pick some good stuff, being dragged around by an eight-year-old and wondering if a nap can be squeezed in after lunch, I'll be pissed off that I sat here woolgathering and listening to train whistles. But I gotta confess, right now, I kinda enjoy it. It's gotta just be the small-town setting, but I'm feeling some of that old vibe, like I'm in on the inner workings while everyone else is oblivious, in tune with the graveyard shift delivering the goods and adjusting the machinery for the sleeping civilians. I got used to the train whistle - you have to, eventually - but at this particular moment it feels good to howl with it into the gloom.

Blank walls

No, this isn't evidence that the warehouse is haunted. I put in a few hours this evening, in the failing light of some dying fluorescent bulbs, taking down some crappy old shelving racks from the store and moving dozens of boxes of books and LP's. The result was a clear wall space, ten feet high and ten feet wide, where my buddy Kevin is going to build a massive floor-to-ceiling rack for our CD inventory.

The entire time I've been doing this, I've been using scrounged shelves - stuff I've picked up at yard sales, gotten along with a purchase, or just grabbed off the curb on garbage night, in a few cases. Great way to start out -- low overhead and all that -- but it's time to put in a little work on the infrastructure. To make this work, I have to be able to walk in and immediately put my hands on one piece of inventory among thousands, especially if it's something cheap. If I spend fifteen minutes looking for a $3 CD, I just cost myself money.

Walls of CDs, library shelving for books in the middle of the room, metal industrial-strength shelves in the back for computers and bulky items -- by fall, I'm hoping the warehouse looks like a place where grown-ups do business, not a hoarder's nightmare or the aftermath of a tornado.

I mean, if you think about it, this whole gig is about bringing order to chaos. You want item X, but you're not gonna drive across 700 miles of two-lane blacktop to find it sitting on a card table in a side yard of a falling-down house in the rural badlands where the rust belt meets Appalachia. I go out and get that one shiny thing out of the infinite maelstrom of crap out there, and pass it along to you. But I can't fully focus on exploring the chaos beyond my street when I'm bogged down by chaos inside my own walls. I earned some of that chaos, in some of the haphazard ways I got to where I am now, but things are stable and growing, and not cleaning it up at this point would just be madness.

And yeah, maybe some new lighting would help in there, while I'm at it.

We need a bigger truck

Vintage Foley long-handled measuring spoons on eBay - ends Sunday


When I was a kid, my dad told me a joke about two Polacks (don't shoot the messenger, that's how jokes came in the 70's) who hauled coal in their truck. They bought it for $100 a truckload, drove it to their customer, and sold it for $100 a truckload. After busting their asses for a year, they were flat broke. "I don't get it," the first Polack cries. "We're working so hard. Why aren't we making money?"

"I got it!" says the other one. "We need a bigger truck!"

I've run, and closed, two record stores, bought out a bookstore, and occasionally have been "gifted" with fifteen or sixteen boxes of crappy paperbacks at a time, at the close of a yard sale when it's starting to rain. I got a lot of stuff. Sure, there are nuggets in even the worst box of crap, but there are a LOT of books, CDs, albums, cassettes, and videos in my warehouse, garage, and basement that are worth a buck, if that much.

Sometimes I'll take an evening, like I did tonight, and I'll grab a couple boxes of the cheap stuff, blowing the warehouse dust off the top and marveling at the crap that settled to the bottom of the record store clearance bin like sediment. Tonight I put up forty or so CDs at $1.25 each. Assuming I actually would eventually sell them all, that nets me $50.00 in income. Keep in mind, I sometimes sell one rare video game cartridge - one - for more than that, and it takes me a helluva lot less time to list one game than 40 CDs, even bunk ones.

So would I be better off just pitching 75% of the inventory in my warehouse into a dumpster?

Part of me rejects that idea out of hand. Call it environmentalism or call it hoarding, but I can't throw away something that still has life in it, even if it's not a rare or expensive commodity. I'm always happy to find an object a new home, even if it's an old paperback or a once-popular CD.

On a more pragmatic level, I know that those $2 and $3 sales can add up. And I've streamlined my listing process to the point where a big pile of cheap stuff can be up in an hour or two, photos, descriptions and all. There's also the fact that my cost on these items is either free, or so close to free as not to matter. If I paid 10 cents each for 100 books, and list them for $1.99 each in a short time, I've (theoretically, at least) turned $10 into $200.

But am I actually costing myself money by leaving better, hotter inventory on the shelf while I list the crap? It could be. I try to list a diverse mix of both, to keep the flow of stuff moving, however sluggishly, out of my warehouse. I do envision a day when ALL of it's listed, there's no backlog, and we get stuff up online within a day or two of it arriving.

Whether that ever happens or not, it keeps my life interesting, digging through such different stuff - a pile of books on Native American culture tonight, a stack of dollar CDs from the dregs of 2001's top 40 tomorrow, a pile of common video games the next night. The real trick, I think, is to keep all this flotsam organized, so that it doesn't cost me 25 minutes in time to search for a $2 item once it's been sold and needs shipped.

The whole thing is always a work in progress. I'm pretty happy with where it is right now, but that's always subject to change every five minutes. For now, though, it's time to shut 'er down for the day, with visions of hardcover first editions dancing in my head. Tomorrow it's more Commodore 64 stuff, and a few more square inches of basement reclaimed.

You're in High School Again

Oscar Mayer Wienermobile plush bean bag toy, bought this weekend

I left Friday night for a picking trip to my hometown of New Philadelphia, Ohio. The circumstances weren't good -- my wife's grandfather had just passed away, and the funeral arrangements were still up in the air. It had been a bad week for getting items listed, so I was starting to feel like a hoarder -- encroaching piles of merchandise were threatening the dining room and my office, and unopened boxes were piling up in the living room. Why the hell was I going out of town to buy more?

But getting out on the road for a day or two sounded good, if only to clear the head and get a little bit of focus. And I had another obligation -- my high school friend Matt is just getting into the Ebay game, and he was driving up from his nome in North Carolina to go with me and learn the ropes of buying. While a part of me doesn't feel like I'm qualified to teach anyone about anything, I realize that in this weird little career path, I've amassed some knowledge. He'd taken time off from his day job, and was driving nine hours each way, so cancelling wasn't really an option.

I left Toledo hours later than I'd intended, after packing a coupla tubs of mail and taking the fam out to dinner at Manhattan's. Any thoughts of being too sleepy from the effects of sausage tortellini to keep my mind on the road were soon banished. A horrendous thunderstorm that had rolled through the area earlier in the day was apparently just waiting a little ways down the Ohio Turnpike, so I could catch up with in and get re-acquainted. I pulled off at one service plaza to get coffee and regroup, and the travelers huddled around the weather map on the overhead TV looked like wet refugees from an overthrown Wal-Mart.

By the time I got to I-77, and its delightful orange barrel slalom, the rain was coming down in horizontal sheets, wind was howling, and my visibility was pretty much zero. I was going longer and longer between periods of being able to see the white lines on the road, and I had to hope that the owner of the headlights ahead of me was in the right place and not prone to sudden stops. Somewhere in that strip-malled apocalypse between Akron and Canton, I actually started hydroplaning, drifting back and forth while trying to stoically keep the wheels straight, doing 40 miles an hour and not feeling at all in control of my vehicle.

It let up a little by the time I rolled into the Motel 6 parking lot at 1am. I gassed up and grabbed a beer, and sat in my dank room, unable to sleep for a couple hours, rattled by the awful weather and a little overwhelmed by the long day ahead.

Got up a little later than I'd intended, but I hadn't seen any must-sees in the local paper's classifieds -- no church sales with $2 bag day or anything time-sensitive. Met up with Matt at his mom's restaurant, and inadvertently managed to solve a childhood mystery at breakfast -- when we were kids, we occasionally had "krepples," kind of a weird sausage-y mush that you cut into strips and fried. Later on, I was pretty sure that what I'd had was actually "scrapple," that east coast delicacy that skeeves out everyone west of Lancaster, PA. But I KNEW we'd called it "krepples"!

There it was, on the menu at Dee's Restaurant. Krepples and eggs! Of course, I ordered it... and it was really good, too, crispy and a little spicy, kind of like sausage but kinda like grits, too, if that makes any sense. It's basically the boiled-off pieces of meat from a pig's skull, with seasonings and corn meal, if I'm not mistaken - but man, is it good. That and some eggs and home fries, and I was good to go.

After a couple uneventful yard sales, Matt and I stumbled across one for the record books, the kind of place that makes you wish you had a camera crew at all times. These folks had just hauled all their yard sale stuff back into their house, due to the looming threat of more bad weather, but had neon-green poster board signs that read COME ON IN! So we did -- up the broken stairs, onto the filthy and sagging enclosed front porch, and into the living room with gritty blackened carpet and the kitchen full of clutter, knick-knacks and kennels. Two dogs and a bird made an unholy racket as we tiptoed around the chaos, while a short, chattery woman told us her life story -- they were moving to Arizona, they had to get rid of everything, the basement was full of stuff they couldn't even get to yet, she had over $7,000 invested in her NASCAR memorabilia collection, and so on.

These people were dealing. Ask about a book, and they wanted you to make an offer on the whole box. Pick up a piece of flint from their collection of Native American tchotchkes, and they'd try to sell you three dozen framed pieces of Southwestern art. I wound up buying an overflowing box of VHS movies, a storage container full of CDs, two big boxes of books, and a few other miscellaneous pieces of flotsam. Matt tried gamely to pick up a few swanky-looking 60's men's magazines, and wound up with two boxes of Playboys, Penthouses, and a few less savory spank rags.

All the while, these people were asking us to buy more, telling us about moving to Arizona again, and flitting around nervously. A tall, threadbare biker kept giving us running commentary on everything we picked up to look at, repeatedly reminding us that it wasn't his sale, he was just a friend of the family. We finally had to flat-out lie and say we'd come back the next day, or next week, to get the transaction finalized and get out the door.

After those people, the next few houses seemed positively normal. I very nearly bought a 100-year-old sleeper sofa because I thought it looked neat, although I don't think anyone with my current backlog of goods needs to get into furniture. At one place, Matt scored big-time, grabbing two big boxes of books (including some still-worth-a-bit textbooks) for ten cents each. I tried buying a big Hoegaarden beer banner off the wall of a guy's garage-slash-mancave, but we couldn't agree on a price.

Leaving Dover and New Philadelphia behind, we headed up Route 800, which eventually leads to Canton and the interstate. Along the way, though, you pass through or near a number of tiny burgs - Zoar, Mineral City, Sandyville, East Sparta. We'd seen an ad for a community sale in East Sparta, so that was our goal. My only memories of Mineral City were from fourth or fifth grade, when my mom had a slimy boyfriend who lived there and I wound up hanging out there for eternal summer days with absolutely nothing to do. I don't remember who I heard refer to it as "Miserable City" back then, but it definitely fit the bill as far as I was concerned.

Passing through this time, a sign for a book sale caught our eye, so we pulled off. Oblivious to the dark clouds hovering in the sky, an ambitious woman with a bunch of little kid helpers had some plastic tubs full of books sitting outside a small trailer, itself a rolling bookstore on wheels. There was no sense to the stacks at all, no rhyme or reason, and when we asked about pricing, the kids kept telling us "it's a donation, just make a donation."

Going into the trailer to talk to the woman, we found out that the sale was for Mineral City's small library, which got no state funding and survived on donated books and volunteer work. Whatever they couldn't use in the library was sold to raise money. "Just give what you feel they're worth," she said of my giant box of books (and the stack of folk music CDs Matt found in a bin). I wound up paying more than I probably would have if the items had been at a yard sale or a thrift -- I guess that guilt approach works. It's not like I can be upset, I'll still do well on the stuff I bought, and the money's definitely for a good cause. I got a book by Charles Darwin at that sale that's at least 100 years old -- can't wait to research that one a little more and see if it's important.

We got to East Sparta and hit a few lackluster sales, and drove up and down some huge hills (my ancient van protesting here and there) following signs for sales people had evidently already packed up. Sensing that we were long past productive yard-sale pick time, I took 800 up to 77 and then headed for a couple goldmines I know of in Akron. The one, Village Discount Outlet, is always a madhouse, and it fulfills everyone's worst stereotypes about thrift stores -- loud, cluttered, understaffed, and you're never more than an arm's-length from a family with fourteen kids gleefully destroying an entire wing of the place, or a morbidly obese person on oxygen snuffily arguing over the price of a coffee mug and holding up fifteen other people in the checkout line.

But for all that, this place is a thing of beauty to me. I always leave there with a cartful of vintage shirts, and they're usually good for some great LP's tucked in among the Mitch Miller frisbees. I didn't get to peruse the CDs because now they're all in a display case, and the woman running that counter was covered up in other customers. A few looked promising, but I did well enough with the shirts, and I was getting to that point where it was time to go.

We didn't hit the Goodwill on the same road, even though I've had a lot of success there in the past, and we didn't go any further north like we'd originally planned. I hadn't expected to eat up that much of the day on yard sales, which I don't usually do up here in the big(ger) city. We were both getting a little burnt out and crispy, so it was time to think about dinner and the rest of the day.

We wound up cooking hot dogs over a fire at Matt's parents' house, visiting with his sisters, their husbands, and his niece Emma, who was a riot. After a couple hours of pleasant conversation, hot dogs, a couple beers and staring into a fireplace, we realized that our grand plan to go out for beers was just not gonna happen. I decided that since the weather was clear, I'd make a break for home, so I could sleep in my own bed and be more prepared for the trip to the funeral we'd be taking. We loaded all Matt's treasures into his car, and I asked how he liked the picking trip - he was fired up, and more than ready to do it again soon. I expect him to be the terror of the mid-south this summer.

I got back on the highway, already wondering if I'd made the right decision, with the windows open a crack and the iPod blaring to keep me alert. I no sooner hit Canton and the heavens opened up AGAIN - I spent another hour driving in teeth-grinding misery, not sure if I was gonna merrily skid right off the road or plow into someone. Luckily, by the time I got to the turnpike, it had blown over, leaving me with a wet but clear and eerily deserted westbound trek to get home.

You know you're beat when you pull into your driveway, shut off the van, and have to sit for a minute to muster up the energy to get out and walk up to your front door. I got in, checked on the kids, kissed the wife and collapsed for a good 12-13 hours of emergency hibernation.

Was it a good trip? Financially, I think so, but it's gonna take me a while to work through listing all the goods I picked up. But it gave me something to focus on at a stressful time, it got me out on the road and soaking up people and stories when I was sitting at home getting self-absorbed and cranky... and most of all it was a great time with my best friend. Matt and I don't get to see each other that much now that he's so far east, but if anything, I think the years and distance have made us even better buds. I wasn't sure how I'd like having someone along on "my" pick, but I'm already envisioning the two of us going on longer trips, further out into the wilderness, loading up on diner food and improbable finds.

Black Oak Burger King

Last month I went on some hellacious picking trips while in central Alabama. Behind the curve as ever, this was my first roadtrip with a GPS, and I was smitten with it. I found one thrift store I'd heard tales of, but had never actually found, and it was a treasure trove -- I spent hours poring over old books, long-forgotten gospel tapes, and I even picked up my first Betamax title. The Foundry is a store run by a rehab center - the proceeds benefit them, and their patients (clients?) work in the store. My pile of CDs and tapes elicited a bonafide Southern "whoo-ee!" from the bagger, who alternated between macking on the lady ringing me up and asking me if I'd ever heard of Percy Sledge.

Thanks to the wonders of the GPS, I also rediscovered another thrift store that I hadn't seen since 2004, since I was down there living at my dad's house, convalescing from open-heart surgery. My sister and I wandered out, for something to do, and found this place called "Big Saver," and man, it was dreadful. It still is today, too, making me wonder how bad a thrift store has to be before it actually gets closed down. Chewed-up romance novels were two bucks, CDs were four, broken answering machines and ZIP drives were $15. If Big Saver wasn't on the same trajectory as two other awesome stores, I'd probably never see it again. But since it's so close to the real goldmines, I'll go make a stop on every trip from here on in, to marvel at its craptitude, hope against hope for a change in management, and to challenge myself to find that one nugget I can sell out of their piles of overpriced garbage.

(I got one there this time, a David and the Giants Christian CD from 1989 or so. I broke my usual picking rule and texted my friend Jeremiah, asking him to look it up and see if it was worth buying - normally, I go with my gut feeling and chance it, but at $4 a disc, mistakes can add up quickly).

I hit the second of my "goldmine" spots after Big Saver, and then planned to head back to Tuscaloosa, where we were visiting my family. But on the way in, as I'd turned from the offramp, I'd seen something odd. In what looked like a decrepit, abandoned Burger King location, complete with twisted and burnt remains of a drive-thru sign, there appeared to be a thrift store! It seemed to have kinda sprouted there, like a patch of kudzu or an impromptu garbage dump off a ravine near a road. The handmade sign outside called it "The Master's Mission," I think, and offered "free clothing to the truely needy ONLY!!!!"

I had to scope this out. I pulled into the gravel-and-broken-concrete-strewn parking lot and walked in through the front door, where a faint ghost of Burger King decal could still be seen. Inside was the kind of place that gives orderly, neat people like my sister full-blown panic attacks -- boxes of crap everywhere, thousands of shirts and dresses crammed onto makeshift racks made of wire and old pipes, dusty dishes piled onto card tables. There was barely anywhere to stand or walk. The "front counter" was an office desk with an adding machine, sitting next to a few suspicious-looking boxes of candy bars for sale. The whole place smelled of laundry hamper and the faraway musk of long-ago deep frying.

Did I dig in? Of course I did, although not as enthusiastically as I might have earlier in the day. Even I have my limits when it comes to shopping and junk-picking, and I was in dire need of a shower, some sweet tea and a nap at this point. But I soldiered on, quickly realizing that this place was chock full o' crap. It looked like they'd raided the dumpster at other, better thrift stores to stock this hopeless outpost. It didn't help that the scrawny white dude at the 'counter' looked more like he shoulda been down the road, manning the thrift run by recovering meth addicts and small time hookers-turned-cashiers. He wasn't chatty, which was good, but he'd perfected the art of staring at you until you felt like you were in his house, against his wishes, rifling through his sock drawer looking for a reason to hold another intervention.

I bought less than half a dozen items at this weird shambles of a store, but one of them was this:



I got it home with my other treasures, listed it, and within a week, I'd sold it to someone in Japan for $40. When I put it up, it was literally the only Black Oak Arkansas shirt on the site.

Black Oak Arkansas completed auction on Ebay

Doing what I do takes a little bit of a leap, one that a lot of people won't contemplate - the idea of going to even a nice thrift store and spending some time digging around bums them out. Even some of the hardier souls I know might have passed on the weird, awkward Burger King thrift store. But I figure, if you're not out looking for adventures, and you're not willing to turn over every stone, then why are you even out on the road in the first place?

In praise of the mail ladies

The Post Office is a pretty big target when people want to talk about how government doesn't work, or can't do things efficiently. I submit that they fall into that same category as so many of the great things that make our modern life so awesome - flushing toilets, paved roads, the inability to go two and a half miles without finding a Big Mac. By that I mean, they work SO well, that we don't notice the 99.9% of good work they do, and blow the occasional failure way the hell out of proportion.

Consider that the post office is mandated to bring mail to anyone who lives within this country's borders, six days a week. They HAVE to. All those grouchy rural conservatives who like to yell about gub'mint tyranny? It costs ten times more to mail a letter to their farmhouse than to my big-city house, but the post office charges the same for both. The fact that these people get curbside mail at all -- including life-saving prescriptions by mail, and such -- is subsidized by the rest of us.

Much has been made of the postal service's deficit. They're required by law to sock away an obscene amount of money into pension funds - ratchet that down to a reasonable level, and presto, things are more even.

I'm not opposed to cutting Saturday delivery, if it'd save money. But it seems to me that when you start cutting customer services on the front end of your business, it doesn't stop, and it's an admission of defeat. How many small businesses have you seen suddenly start closing two or three days a week, or reducing their hours to weird and inconvenient times, shortly before going under completely? I'd rather see the postal service go all-out, campaign hard to win business from FedEx and UPS, and get the word out that their service is pretty damn world-class.

Obviously, I interact with the post office more than a lot of people. But it's no exaggeration at all to say that, if not for easy access to post offices and helpful, speedy service once there, I would not be able to do what I do for a living. The post office is a business grower, a two-century-old economic stimulus plan that works, and in real numbers, pays its own way. And it's made quite a bit of our civilized modern life possible.

Big thanks to Beth and Connie, the front-counter clerks at my post office, and to everyone who busts their asses to get the mail out.

The 1541 Disk Drive Can Kiss My Ass

I was making great progress tonight, cataloging and testing out Commodore 64 software to list for sale. Then I made the tragic error of trying to load in a game whose disks didn't work. The disk drives, the notorious 1541 model, made that machine-gun sound, and promptly stopped loading anything else -- even disks that had just worked.

I wouldn't be so irritated by this if I didn't have eight or ten of these albatrosses piled up around here. They spit out errors like a goalie spits out teeth, and they go out of alignment if you so much as fart in their general direction. I have some instructions on how to get them realigned, but I haven't tried them yet. I shouldn't HAVE to. These temperamental pieces of shit were badly designed and terribly put together.

After reading Brian Bagnall's history of Commodore, the company, it's amazing to me that so much coolness was extracted out of hardware made so indifferently. I was having a great time, and it ground to a halt, like the heads of the drive hitting track zero. Screw this, I'm going to bed. Anyone want to take ten of these shitty drives, realign me five of them, and keep the other five for their trouble?

The late, great auction

I just had a big pile of video game cartridge auctions end. A few went for close to their minimum bids, and the rest didn't sell at all. I made enough money to make the extra work of putting the lot up in one night worthwhile... but Ebay took a much bigger chunk of fees than if I'd just put the items up as fixed-price, with no deadline for selling.

There are fewer and fewer instances where an auction even makes sense any more. I have a general idea of what I want for most of the items I'm selling, and I'm in a position to park them and wait a few weeks for the right buyer to come along. Auctions seem to work best when you're in fire-sale mode (and 9 times out of 10, when you're dumping stuff that desperately, most of it's being sold to other sellers, who will - wait for it - list it at a higher fixed price).

Most people think of Ebay and they think of auctions -- but I think most casual buyers are over the whole idea of baby-sitting an auction listing for a week, waiting around to see if they got an item, just to save a couple bucks on it. They'd rather jump online, buy what they want, pay for it on the spot, and assume it's being shipped out in a reasonable time frame.

I know that after tonight, I'm done with the auction format for video games. Again, not complaining, just observing and making constant little adjustments to the game plan. I think picking fixed prices, then periodically marking down whatever doesn't sell in a timely fashion, is the way to go for this stuff, especially given its prominence in Ebay's new search methods.

Enough shop talk - back down to the basement to root through more Commodore 64 stuff!

Nation of Islam 1997 Revival T-shirt on Ebay

The vintage t-shirt listing juggernaut continues, with this classic. Probably the all-time best funny-look-generator at the thrift store checkout counter.

Tohono O'Odham Nation Shirt on Ebay

Planned to list a whole pile of shirts tonight -- I have about 50 to add to the Store. But with all the other stuff I did today, plus a sick toddler to mind, I got about five listings in and realized I'm fried. More goodies, and long-winded ruminations about my nerd empire, tomorrow.

The Junkman Cometh

Earlier this week I drove from my home in Toledo to the outskirts of Flint, Michigan. It was a beautiful sunny day, one of the warmest so far this spring. I spent two hours with the iPod on shuffle, kicking out random road gems from Gorefest to Billie Holiday to D.R.I. to Bobby Bare to New Bomb Turks. It seemed like every song was chosen to encourage speeding, and windows rolled down, and general good vibes all around.

Made it to one of those post-WW2 subdivisions about noonish, and met up with Fred and Joyce, two old folks obviously married since the dawn of time. Fred was selling me a vanload of Commodore 64 items - several computers, a bunch of disk drives, a 24-pin dot-matrix printer, disks, magazines, cartridges, even the computer desk it all lived on in his well-appointed basement for the last 25 years.

Fred had had three strokes, three heart attacks, a stent, and some sort of other arterial decrepitude* (I'm signing Arterial Decrepitude to my imaginary label). Yet he kept trying to pick up the heavy old-school Commodore monitor, or chunks of the desk, and hump them up the stairs. His wife would yell at him, he'd grumble, then he'd try it again a few minutes later. Joyce and I finally prevailed upon him to go up to the carport and get the door for us, which he did, reluctantly. Joyce (herself 75 if she was a day) helped me get the desk up the steps, making a few mildly snarky comments here and there about "oh my, you got quite a deal on this stuff, didn't you?" and "how much did you sell all this stuff for, Fred?"

I felt good about the transaction anyway, but Fred and Joyce were just the icing on the cake. And Fred still had another retro system, a Commodore 128, still up and running next to the space where the 64 had lived. That was awesome - he may have been downsizing, but he wasn't getting out of the game altogether.

Shaking hands with Fred and Joyce, I closed up the van and headed back to Toledo, to the tune of even more road songs so perfect for the occasion, they had to have been picked by an intelligent force. Or maybe it was just that the day was so good, any song would do. I eyed a few places to stop for lunch, but then I got a vision of Charlie's in Toledo and their patty melt platter, so I hit the gas and waited till I was on home turf to chow.

That's the first fun part of what I do. The next fun part is illustrated above. What you see in the lower photo above is Fred and Joyce's Commodore 64 loot, jammed into my basement "war room" in a disheveled pile, along with a few boxes of other miscellaneous C64 goodies I've picked up on Ebay. Tonight, after I finish listing a pile of t-shirts, I'm going to go down to that basement and start sorting. I'll play a bunch of games, test out a bunch of equipment, and start my sell pile, all the while deciding what I need to keep to have a kickass working system for myself. It's to test future purchases on, sure... but it's also to program on, and play on, and to time-travel back to 1986 and high-five my fourteen-year-old self who didn't get to have nice stuff.

And then the last fun part is taking the "sell pile" back upstairs, taking pictures of each piece of retro flotsam I've accumulated, and offering them up for sale on Ebay. That's how I pay the bills these days. I wallow in stuff I like -- records, books, old computers, t-shirts, games -- and I wheel and deal in just about all of it. By the time I get this backlog of C64 stuff pushed through and listed for sale, I'll have twelve more boxes to open and sort. Or I'll find another cool old guy selling off a basement full of 80's wizardry. Or I'll buy out another used bookstore, or someone's death metal t-shirt collection, or -- hell, who knows -- maybe a trailer full of Pez dispensers or cuckoo clocks.

All the little mundane steps in buying, collecting, sorting, pricing, photographing, describing, selling, packing and shipping all this stuff... that's what I plan to talk about here. Because it's not all that mundane to me. I enjoy the hell out of this gig, and wish I'd gotten it down years before I did. I'm having the time of my life, keeping a roof overhead, and getting plenty of family time in while I'm at it. All those mundane little pieces of experience make a helluva big picture, and it's only getting better.