Yesterday I Just Wanted Some Second Hand Books and Wandered Unexpectedly Into a Garbage Bag Sale.

Yesterday I went to the second hand store.  When I first found this place, I liked it, even though it's associated with a hospital and so I tried not to think about things like people dying in the clothes and ending up with a lot of dead people stuff in my house, which, if you watch enough "Dead Files" you learn that this is not good at all.  But my love of stuff won out, as it does, and it became my favorite haunting hunting ground, because, mostly, it was super cheap.

At first it was great.  Oh,  ok, yeah, there were the normal, usual amounts of aggravation, mostly because it was totally FILLED with old sour bitches older ladies, but the scores here were so great and so cheap it was totally worth it, even if I had to burn all my clothes scrub the smell of depends off my clothing when I came home.  As time went on, however, some things happened that seriously affected my relationship with this establishment.

1.  Old creepy antique hunters started prowling the store, with their clothes that smelled like 10 years of chain smoking, and that one one guy that couldn't stop singing.

2.  The price of all the stuff went up, way past acceptable used junk prices and was now moving dangerously towards the kind of pricing reserved for antiques.  On the upside, this had an effect on the antique hunters, something similar to holding up a crucifix dipped in garlic sauce to a vampire, because the antique hunters only call these things antiques when they are selling them.  When buying them, they are valueless knickknacks.

3.  The shop started being closed more than it was open and pretty soon you never knew what their hours were, and for some reason I always went there on the days that they were closed or the days that they didn't open until 2:40 pm and I would have my faced pressed against the glass at 10:00 am.

Then, one day my  friend told me that they were having a 50% off sale, but I couldn't face the imagined scene which included waring old people armed with canes and ailments, singing and maybe even dancing antique dealers, and all the sad smells of poverty, old age, the stench of smoky  and in-need-of-washing clothes, and of course, the unique scent of things that came from dead people's houses. So I didn't go.

But I did keep thinking about books.  You see, I have a bookcase.  Yeah, I know, weird, right?  Well, this bookcase needs some books.  Now, I do have books, but they are in other bookcases.  I needed some for this bookcase, some "pretty books" with lovely hard cover bindings, and maybe a few weird books to stick in there prompt newcomers to my home to wonder about my true nature.  You know, because sometimes I get bored.

This second hand store has books.  Lots of them.  And they are cheap.  And so cheap that if you take 50% off, they end up being free.  I think.  I'm not good at math.  So I stopped by to get my book-like-items and found that now  you could fill a bag for $3!!!  YAYYYYYYYYYYYYY!

Everything in the store was up for grabs.  Except the books.  They were the same price as ever.  Because, my friends, this is my life,

Still, I figured I had nothing to complain about (a rare moment) because the books were still only $1.00, so what the fuck, I guess I would just go grab some.  So I stood looking at books with another guy who obviously didn't care about a sale and we stood out from the others, you know,  without our trash bags that we planned to stuff with a bunch of nothing because there was nothing left in the store at this point, that people kept reminding us that the books were not included in the "Stuff Your Bag" deal, and we kept nodding, acknowledging the rule, and feeling so terribly better than all those seriously redneck white trash stuff grabbers with their greedy eyes and yellow or black bags.  We were buying books, full price books, after all.  We like to read. We know how to read.   Hmmph.

This will make them wonder, don't you think?