It's tablecloth day!

As I look through my Ebay Store full of listings, I can sometimes tell by the photo of an item where I was when I took the picture and listed the thing for sale. Most of the photos over the last couple years have been taken on the hardwood floor of my dining room. The newest pictures are taken in the garage/office. But sometimes I'll see CDs laid on a white shag carpet -- those listings were done over a holiday trip to my brother-in-law's house. Other listings show backdrops of kitchen counters or carpeting from places we crashed while the band was on tour, and in a few extremely old and outdated listings, the gnarled, unpolished hardwood floors of our previous house make an appearance.

Thus it will be, for months to come, that when I look back and see cassettes on a festive striped tablecloth, like the one above, I'll remember this day. I'll recall driving to my mother-in-law's on a beautiful hot day, taking Route 2 to I-90 East with the windows down, cranking King's X and Deep Purple tapes in the deck of a Nissan Maxima I was about to hand over to someone else (thank christ for that). I'll remember sitting on the porch in the afternoon with my daughter listening to the birds chirping as they lined up for their free meal at Grandma's bird feeders.

And I'll remember being wide awake at 2:30am, sneaking back downstairs so as not to wake everyone else up, and being glad I brought along this bin full of old tapes to throw in the Ebay Store while I grumbled about insomnia (and drank coffee, making the problem still worse).

I probably should have moved the tablecloth and taken the photos with the wood of the table as the backdrop, but I didn't, and they look like that. Will it matter? Maybe they'll stand out. Maybe two weeks from now, I'll marvel at how quickly the tapes from "Tablecloth Day" sold -- even that copy of Tommy Conwell and the Young Rumblers' "Rumble" from 1988 (I'll wait while you go YouTube him to figure out what his one hit was, and no, the song you're thinking of is actually Henry Lee Summer).

Will getting twenty more cheap tapes out of the "to do" pile and into the active inventory be worth the ass-dragging I'll be doing tomorrow? At the moment, I don't have a lot of choice. So for now, let's hope that presentation matters, and this picnic of outdated audio technology attracts a few ants.