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.