last month i popped down to one of my favorite discoveries, the community dolla warehouse on east georgia ave, south of downtown. probably the best kept secret in town, this place serves up deals by the truckload, and judging by the fact that there were quite a few holdovers from my last visit, it's not exactly being picked clean on a weekly basis. there are probably a couple reasons for this:
1. nobody knows where it is, or that it exists. i'm doing what i can to rectify that, obviously. you should too.
2. it's kind of freaky looking - observe.
3. (and this is an inarguable point, even if i had no idea how to photograph it) it was hot as BALLS in there, i mean it's a former concrete warehouse, it's not like the guy has HVAC set up in there, or like he would even bother running it if he did. i was more or less marinating in my own sweat after a few minutes but kids, as a special piece of inside information from me to you, because we're pals, let me tell you this:
get over it. if you want to find the really amazing shit (and there was some here, to be sure) then you may occasionally be called upon to put personal comfort in some other place than the forefront of your mind, just for a few minutes. it was hot. i got sweaty. so what, i survived. i'm sure there have been people who walked in, looked around, felt how hot it was, and just turned around and walked right back out. i feel bad for them. do you know why?
because they missed shit like this. this is a naked lady butt ashtray, from florida. i don't even smoke any more and i was tempted to nab this, because it's so priceless and vintage. and, it was like 25 cents or something ridiculous like that, i think.
(sorry about the blurriness of some of the pictures, the light in there was hells weird) they've really beefed up their game at the community dolla since the last time i was there. these shelving racks were new, along with
this enormous locked case full of dvds (?) which i didn't really look at too much, but which appeared to be full of... well, dvds i guess, of many different varieties.
and there was a BARGAIN TABLE! covered with, predictably enough...
bargains. i found a couple coffee cups.
there were more books than last time, although i didn't let myself linger over them for too long, since i'm currently trying to slough off the not-unsizable mountain of books i've spent the last few years accumulating... did i mention that already?
and of course SPACE HAT! SPACE HAT! space hat which i AGAIN did not buy because well, it's a fucking plastic hat that i have no reason to own but i LOVE the fact that it was still there! it's like going back to the town you grew up in and absentmindedly wandering into the bar you always used to hang out at and seeing the same guy behind the bar that you saw the last time you were there... a little sad, but so funny that you don't really mind! it was that great!
also there was a lot of furniture, just like last time. there's some kind of half-formed question in my mind about where all this stuff comes from - i mean it's not like this dude has a donation center or something. it's just him, hanging out in this fuckall huge warehouse all day. where does he get the dinette sets from? i briefly entertained the notion of this cackling madman who broke into random houses and murdered their elderly occupants and cleaned out all of their possessions into the back of his panel truck in the middle of the night and drove back to his concrete warehouse maniacally laughing with insane delight... and then i realized he was STANDING RIGHT BEHIND ME WITH A KNIFE! no, i realized i'd spent way too much time watching z-grade horror movies back in the day, and that all the stuff he had just came from all over the place. it's stuff. it's fucking everywhere. it's really not that unbelievable that he ended up with a whole bunch of it. anyone can. it's the american dream: "you too, can have a whole fucking bunch of stuff! excelsior!"
this (white cord notwithstanding) is more or less a replica of the phone we had in the house i grew up in, until at least the early nineties, if not later. every time i see these phones (not that it's all THAT often) i get swept up in a bunch of weird memories. what's cooler than the phone, when you're a kid? you never know when it's going to ring! it could be ANYONE on the other end! you're a fucking kid, it's not like you have any responsibilities than anyone's going to call you up and tell you about! my favorite part about the phone when i was a kid was that my parents both LOATHED taking phone calls or talking to basically anyone on the phone, but being more or less total technophobes, put off even getting an answering machine until maybe 1993 or something like that, so i (the kid) got relegated to phone-answering duty, which also doubled as lying-to-people-on-the-phone duty, which required me to convincingly come up with plausible reasons why either (or both) of my parents couldn't be summoned to the phone in any reasonable kind of time frame. deaths and dismemberments were right out - too implausible. baths, trips to the supermarket, and walking the dogs were favorites, right at the top of my list, although the most reliable one (aside from "they're sleeping," which had the added bonus of being true a whole lot of the time) was "i don't know," because who's going to argue with a nine year old kid who says he has no idea why his parents can't come to the phone? "DAMMIT KID YOU KNOW, I KNOW YOU KNOW AND YOU'RE GONNA TELL ME RIGHT NOW!"
2 other things that i just thought of that have nothing to do with anything, and then we'll get back on track:
1. my mom told me once that before she had kids, if phone salesmen called that she didn't want to talk to, she'd pretend to be her own swedish housekeeper and "take und message" for herself. i do so love that woman. if you ever wondered where i got it from...
2. my voice dropped kind of early, around 12 or 13 or so, like dropped through the floor, so it was fortuitous that we got an answering machine, because no one ever believed i was a kid on the phone any more, ever. they actually did start arguing with me when i'd tell them i was a kid after that. i'm not kidding.
this was a badass reel to reel recorder, still more or less functioning as far as i could tell, for all of like five or ten bucks, i think. have your own watergate at home, for less than it costs to order a pizza!
okay so here's what's up with this. i saw this big blue tube standing up on one of the aforementioned shelving units, and scoffed, initially, when i saw it. "certainly this can't be a masonic apron, perfectly preserved in its original tube," i thought to myself. "there's no plausible explanation for how it ended up here, so therefore it cannot exist," i thought, with my usual pig ignorance...
BAM! there it is! it was really an actual masonic apron! do you have any idea how much of a find this is? for those of you who don't give two shits about freemasonry or the illuminati or any of that crap, at least understand that possessions like this tend to follow their owner to the grave (and perhaps beyond MUHUHAHAHAHA), so this is kind of right up there in terms of weirdness with like an old family photo album or a used dildo or something. too gross? okay, scratch that. a... uhhh... diary. yeah, that's it. a diary.
oh, ron popeil, you modern day davinci. is there anything you couldn't invent, market, co-opt, or sell? i'll tell you this right now, i was SO damn tempted to buy this fucking donut maker, for SO many reasons, but i in fact, did not. and i'm going to spend many long, sleepless, NON-donut filled nights wrestling with that fact. but as i've mentioned before (in fact i think i had occasion to bring this up last time i was at the community dolla warehouse) if i brought home everything from every thrift store i went to that amused me or made me think, my bank account would contract trichinosis and die and my apartment would bloat up like violet beauregarde and explode all over the sidewalk, covering any unfortunate passers by in a veritable mountain of filth. VINTAGE filth though, mind you.
i actually bowed to this thing before i put it back on the shelf and walked away. i am losing my mind.
AND on that note... anyone for punch?
love
d
