I was in the mood for a garage sale this morning, so I checked the ads on Craigslist and found a warehouse sale at the west end of town. Normally, I try to avoid warehouse sales because they’re always store returns, and I’m not interested in that type of shit. I like old shit. I decided to take a chance on this one, though, because back in September, they were giving away a shitload of milk crates and other plastic totes, which led me to believe that they don’t trade in Amazon pallets.

The other reason I decided to check it out was because Friday sales are always the best. If you’ve got so much shit to sell that you don’t think one day will be enough time to sell it, and you choose a standard working day as one of your sale days, you’re probably going to make deals that benefit the buyer more than yourself.

So, I rode down there to see what it was about. All I took with me was a shopping bag because I wasn’t expecting to find anything of interest. When I saw the sale, I was certain I wouldn’t find anything if for no other reason than everything was in boxes and required a lot of digging. I hate that.

I’m not sure what their deal is, but everything they were selling looked like was estate sale leftovers. I suppose it could be storage auctions, too. The point is, the stuff wasn’t retail returns, it was old. The woman taking money said that tomorrow they would have new stuff, so I guess they have a continuous source of inventory.

When I arrived, there was an 18-wheeler attempting to back up to the loading dock, which was at an angle to the driveway. On any other day it might not have been any problem, but today the tables for the sale, and all of the customers were in the way. It took ages for him to back up. I heard a man say, “It’s time to go back to trucking school.” What a dick, I thought. Old men in this city are like that: Simultaneously, and equally ignorant and arrogant.

As I said before, I hate digging through boxes. If I see nothing but boxes at a garage sale, I won’t even stop. I did a lap through all of the aisles just to get a sense of the offerings, but nothing jumped out at me. Of course, my attention was split between the stuff in the boxes and the truck trying to squeeze by the tables with inches to spare. Once he finally made it to the loading dock, I was able to focus and that’s when I found some cassette tapes. I’ve been looking for some time, with no success, for jazz tapes. I didn’t find any today, but I did find some big band music, so I’m getting close.

Once I found those, I went back through to take a closer look through some of the boxes. I found some interesting things, but not interesting enough to buy. There were some old film slides, and 16mm film. There was also a box of porn on VHS. What I did find that was interesting enough to buy, though, was a 12′ stand for my green screen, and a VHS-C video camera that came in a nice bag and included an unopened VHS-C cassette tape and a used one. I hoped the used one might have home videos on it. It was a woman demonstrating a belly dance. The video camera doesn’t work, so that’s a bummer. Still, it was a good sale, and I might take Bonnie back tomorrow.