Billy Ocean
Garage Sales And The Hunt For Them
Garage sales and the hunt for them present two adventures for the typical human being, who’s actually a cheapskate at heart. The first — and probably most intense adventure — is the hunt for the garage sale, which many people would actually say is more viscerally satisfying than the garage sale itself, if one were being honest. Once we’ve convinced ourselves that stuff in all its glory is what we need, the need to hunt for it becomes intense.
Today, it’s a fact that the garage sale industry has turned such activities into events that we now look at as being similar to watching the grand old game of baseball, that’s how much of a national pastime it’s become. And though buying more and more stuff at a garage sale is certainly something that will occur, searching out the right sale for the right digital sport watch can be like searching for El Dorado, some would say.
What, then, can one say about cruising the local neighborhoods endlessly on a Saturday afternoon looking for signs of a garage sale, such as a badly Xeroxed ad tacked onto a telephone pole? Apparently, not much but we do it anyway, all in the expectation of finding little Billy an electric guitar for sale at a garage sale held by two little old ladies selling lace doilies and tea cozies, right?
And even when that’s the case, it’s probably a fair bet that several or more of those doilies are going to be bought on the theory that the need to entertain Queen Elizabeth might just arise one day. Or, maybe it was just fun to track down a garage sale in the way an African big game hunter would go out on safari back in the old days. Perhaps the only thing found on that safari was a lonely gazelle, but the thrill was in the adventure, many times.
Maybe one has decided that the spare bedroom that’s now unoccupied because Junior has gone off to college would make the perfect fitness room and the need for a bit of fitness equipment has now arisen. This is so even when an expensive gym membership was purchased just a few months ago and has been used a grand total of one time, right? That high-tech fitness-room-to-be certainly needs some stuff and the garage sale is the place to get it.
It makes little difference to us whether or not we actually find anything of real worth at one of these garage sales, though. Rather, just like the big game hunter on one of those old-style African safaris, the thrill will be in the hunt. Finding old cassette tapes of some 1970s heavy metal band that we once listened to back in high school gives us a vicarious thrill like we once used to get on a roller coaster, most would say.
The bottom line about garage sales and the hunt for them is that it’s probably the case that we need to be out there searching for stuff because it’s in our DNA. Our ancestors were hunter/gatherers and we are, too. Nowadays, we might be hunting and gathering extraneous stuff that we might never use, but we certainly love the fact that we’re out there hunting, even when the hunt turns up nothing much of importance for us.
Billy Ocean – Caribbean Queen
