8/3/08 - Salvo Danny Thomas, Goodwill Industries, Shoe & Boot Outlet (Summer of Summer)

hello! it is me again. i hope you all enjoyed reading the previous special guest entry as much as my goodly wife enjoyed writing it, and i hope she enjoyed writing it a lot. we had fun, we laughed a lot, maybe even learned a little something along the way. but now it's back to the unrelentingly grim, stoic, vodka-soaked status quo that is my end of this little blog venture. bitter/books: it's like a god damned bergman film up in this b*tch.

(TOTAL SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION: i started a personal blog that deals with any non-thrift store related stuff that happens to pop up in my life and travels and adventures and whatnot...if you'd care to take a look, here it is.)

this week we tried to make a long, looping journey through town, hitting up a couple of our favorite stores and making a foray back into summer avenue (and beyond, was the plan at least) since we're still ostensibly pursuing this whole "summer of summer" thing, even though i'm sure it's obvious to even the most casual of observers that the whole concept is starting to wear a little thin. we had to cut things short, however, for a few reasons:

1. it was six hundred f*cking degrees outside
2. the stores that we had left to go to (the dirty flea market on summer and nancy's on wells station) are pretty horrible
3. we were hungry
4. did i mention how hot it was?

but before we completely pussed out and hightailed it back to the relative comfort and security of our air conditioned apartment, we managed to get a little bit done. here are some of their hands.



i did not mean to feature this silly looking pt cruiser so prominently in this picture. this being our third (i think) documented visit to the salvation army on danny thomas boulevard, i am sort of running out of interesting angles from which to shoot the outside of the building. so you get basically a dumb picture of a car, with a slight suggestion of what may be a salvation army in the background. hooray!



anyway business as usual at good ol' salvo, lots of snazzy furniture, some of which were actually holdovers from our last visit, which is pretty remarkable considering the insane turnover rate of most of the merchandise. maybe the economy is slowing down a little after all



por exemplo (that's espanish) this unbelievably bomb-ass desk was selling for $20 and no one snagged it in the roughly hour and a half we were there. to say that my flabbers were gasted would just be a monumental understatement. i fully expect this thing to be gone by the time i get back down there, or we are going to have to have a long talk, kids.



i really don't know who gets rid of this stuff. beautiful queen sized sleigh bed, something like $200 i think. i have wanted one of these damn things for so long.



and for another $100 you get this (sort of) matching futon! eh? eh? okay so it's totally chewed up and overpriced, fine. i never said it was perfect.



but enough about the furniture. i would have been a lot more tempted to buy this if it came with a tape of "rockapella" that you could listen to while you played. i have a friend who saw them live in concert a few years ago. i guess they still do the carmen sandiego theme song at every concert. that's hilarious, and a little sad, too.



OVERSIZED FORK AND SPOON! my wife made a point that these are completely crucial "southern" objects, that there's something about the comically overblown representation of home, and hearth, and all these concepts that is so inextricably tied to the whole southern demeanor...unfortunately she made said point sometime last night while we were pounding shots of vodka and playing parcheesi so i kind of forgot exactly what she said, but i'm sure it was brilliant and insightful and wonderful and all that good sh*t. being an ignorant northerner i just think they're hilarious. we laugh at you people a lot.



i happened to stumble across a whole mess of these things, apparently cartridges for something called the RCA Studio II Home TV Programmer, a predecessor of the atari 2600. if they actually happened to be selling the unit to play these little bastards on, you can bet your ass (and anyone else's ass you'd like to bet) that i would have snapped that shit up in the span of the proverbial heartbeat. there were...



space war...math fun



tennis/squash...fun with numbers...baseball



and who can forget the most entertaining video game of all time...biorhythm? anyway i've gone off on a tangent or two about vintage gaming systems at several points in the past, and i have to say this piqued my curiosity like none other, for some reason that i can't exactly put my finger on. if anyone's got an old rca studio 2 home tv controller system sitting around gathering dust, just drop me a line and i will gladly come and pay you AT LEAST the sum of ONE (1) american dollar for it, gladly.



moving on...there were, no shit, about 50 of these modular little tampon-applicator-colored unbreakable plastic cups all stacked up in a cardboard box for about a dollar a piece, which (my wife pointed out) look like they came off of an american airlines flight from 1979. once again, i ask you, dear readers...

WOULD

YOU

BUYIT?!?!?!??!?!???!?!?!??/1/1/1//1/11/1111

i wish i had.



i have nothing to say about these



speaking of things i wish i had bought, someone had apparently donated their entire collection of vintage hardback romance novels that came from the same weird old lending library that was apparently operational in memphis through some early part of the 20th century? anyway there were too many brilliant pieces for me to even begin to try to make heads or tails of the whole thing. here are some of their hands.















btw i did not buy any of these, for numerous stupid reasons which i completely regret, so if you're salivating as much as i am after seeing all that sh*t then get on down to the salvation army on danny thomas and snap those bad boys up. you'll be glad you did.



so anyway, onwards and upwards we went to the goodwill industries store on chelsea avenue, where they're apparently having a 50% OFF EVERYTHING SALE for more or less forever! that means...



50% off



this rolling bar



this scott baio (bob loblaw?) album



all these books (that i bought)



this AMAZING vintage coat (which i didn't buy, it almost fit but not quite)



this OTHER amazing vintage coat (i should be selling this crap on ebay, seriously)



and, of course, the perfect pancake maker. hooray!



last but not least we plowed through the Shoe and Boot Outlet, to at least make this week's entry marginally about Summer Avenue, even if just in the most tangential sense. it was gross. here are some of their hands.



in addition to shoes and boots, they apparently sell a shitload of mattresses and busted up old weird furniture here. no explanation.



there are enough weird little secondhand touches to almost qualify this place as a thrift store, but all of it (the whole discussion, any thoughts you've ever had about any subject, ever, anywhere) is/are all rendered moot by the sheer mindboggling quantity of crazy, over the top stripper boots that this place has up for sale. check it.









disgusting.

all right, good night and gazizza, if you really find yourself with no other options feel free to check out my (SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION) personal online journalistic blog type web place site thing which will update, unbelievably, even more often than this site will. otherwise, until next time...

EXCELSIOR!!!

your pal

dave