bitter/books

Salvation Army Kirby Whitten Rd

2009-12-12T01:56:00.001-06:00

oh friends. do i have a tale to tell. i have been to the belly of the beast and i escaped alive.

this is the exterior of the new salvation army family store they opened in bartlett on kirby whitten road. as i mentioned in a previous post, they shut down the danny thomas facility to relocate way the hell out here in the boonies (which i'm not too happy about, still) but hell and ass did they build one serious facility.

your first impression when you walk in is "wow, it's huge. and it's clean. and it's huge and clean and WHAT THE HELL IS ALL THIS CRAP." that was mine, anyway. it looks like a marshall's, or tj maxx. it looks like a god damned department store.

there's a book area.

there are oceans of racks of clothes and shirts and whatnots.

there are large, clean, spacious dressing rooms.

with little bench things. forgive me if i'm a little out of practice, but i haven't written one of these large scale "overview of a new store posts" in a while.

there were a buttload of good cheap shoes which is a god's honest miracle, along with

a goodly amount of solid, clean kitchenware. clearly they were pulling out all the stops for this one.

i was in the market for some additional bedding and boy did they not disappoint. tons of quilts, blankets, sleeping bags, and sheets, all for fairly reasonable prices.

the "art" is almost always the most specious part of any thrift store but they had a few things that might have actually passed muster as home decorations, including that small portrait on the lower right that was selling for around $45 i think and would have made a snazzy addition to my walls if my walls weren't made of plaster and next to impossible to hang anything on.

LOTS of really nice furniture, much like the other premium salvo on austin peay, like this divan-ish lounge chair sort of thing that was selling for around $50 i think, not a bad deal at all.

this is when it started to get hairy. i had filled up an entire (regrettably small) cart with clothes, bedding, various fooferah and whatnots and had decided to buy what i had and take it out to the car so i could come back in and load up another round (a first, in recent experience anyway) and the last thing i snagged was a REALLY NICE set of dishes for one, for about ten bucks. so i go up and pay for my shit, take it out and by the time i get back inside they've brought out ANOTHER ENTIRE SET of the same amazing dishes, right where the last ones were. so i bought them too.

and then it got really nuts. i saw these two sets of church bench chair things for like a little over 100, really clean and nicely upholstered, and i began to sweat.

i saw these two beautiful black upholstered office chairs for around 50 a piece and i began to shake.

this wine cabinet thing almost sent me into fits. what IS this place, i asked myself?

i apologize if this entry is lacking in the usual witty digressive banter but looking at these pictures i'm just bowled over again at the unbelievable caliber of the merch they were just constantly slinging out onto the floor at this place. that's a PERFECT looking deco armoire thing, couldn't have been more than a bill and change. god, why do i not have room for this shit?

weirdass 80's bedroom set thing, basically untouched. where does this crap come from? is this the kind of stuff they donate to charity out in white-flight-land?

the books, by the way, were very reasonably priced, although i am not, have not been, and probably will not ever be again in the market for buying any of them. still, it was nice to know.

and TONS of vhs/dvd/records and cds and stuff. the old guy was extra. i asked. actually, remember him. he factors in later.

i didn't buy any movies, but i was SORELY tempted to pick this classic up, BIBLEMAN, starring one willie aames of "charles in charge" semi-fame. the pictures on the back of this thing were laughable, but i wisely concluded that picking it up and looking at it and giggling was about the maximum amount of amusement i was going to gleam from this particular object, so actually bringing it up to the counter and plunking down money for it and taking it home would have been a mistake. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN IT CAN BE TAUGHT.

i already have a pretty solid camping shovel but this was still tempting. i will say if this store was lacking in anything it was the sort of "large dirty metal things just sort of lying around" department but thankfully there are a dozen other stores in town that seem to SPECIALIZE in that so it was no big deal.

see these woks? these woks were enormous and they were 12 bucks a piece and i SO bought the one on the right because it was huge and heavy and a bodum and you could fit a whole cat in it (I WOULD NEVER) and so i had to get it. there happened to be a LOT of things i had to get that day.

by this point i was getting dizzy, just stumbling around snapping random pictures of things. this tiny kitchen cauldron and weird matched set of cow glasses, for example.

not one,

but TWO grandfather clocks. really? TWO grandfather clocks in the same thrift store? i began to suffer under the delusion that this was all an elaborate prank, a la "the truman show" or something. my kneecaps began to sweat. i thought of escape, all the while tossing things into my cart.

when i saw this green glass bookkeeper's lamp, i knew it was time. i had to make a desperate break for freedom. i could hear my bank account weeping softly in the distance. just for perspective's sake, i haven't had to MAKE myself leave a thrift store in almost three years, since the days of the almighty value village in houston, but i had to do it this day. in my mad dash for the exit i caught a few last fleeting glimpses of the terrifying paradise i was barely escaping with my sanity (and credit limit) intact.

i will tell you this, dear readers. don't make the arduous journey out to the wild wastelands of bartlett without your head screwed on straight, or this place will flip you upside down and steal your wallet (albeit in exchange for a bunch of amazing shit). let me put it this way: i spent a little over 100 bucks. regular readers of this internet blogging writing spacing thing will know that i am a discriminating shopper, in addition to being a very poor, stingy, miserly fellow, but there were just SO MANY things i couldn't say no to, SO MANY things i'd been looking for forever, SO MANY things that i wouldn't have been able to look at myself in the mirror knowing i let slip through my fingers that i handed over my card (both times) with a huge smile on my face, and i don't regret a god damned penny that i spent there. but the usual rules apply:

1. set aside some extra time
2. set aside some extra money
3. and for god's sake, don't have any expectations. just look at what's there and appreciate it and see what you see, and buy what you like.

i'll be back next time to hopefully conclude my goodwill bonanza from four months ago, but until then, good luck and godspeed, my children. i'll say nice things about you when you're gone.

love

d

oh ps that old guy i mentioned earlier? when i was leaving (the final time) he was bringing his cart back inside after loading out into his car and looking for his female lady shopping companion, and he walks inside and mutters "i thought i had my wife with me before" and one of the managers standing nearby NOT MISSING A GOD DAMNED BEAT says "we sold her!"

and out i went to my car, cackling like a god damned maniac. live to thrift, thrift to live.

Goodwill Bonanza pt 2/3

2009-12-04T02:27:00.002-06:00

thunder. Thunder. THUNDERCA-oh crap. wrong rallying cry. forgot where i was.

try this one on for size. GOO! as in, "the next 'GOO'dwill store i hit up on my three store bonanza in one day, several months ago." we'll just say "GOO!" for shorthandsies. it's easier.

sweet little ceramic mamacita for like three or four bucks if memory serves, totally made me want to snap on my bandolero and play some flamenco guitar like the guy in those old antonio banderas talk show sketches from saturday night live who would stand in the back and scream "SENOR PLEASE NO ISA TOO SEXY" every time chris kattan would threaten to take off his shirt, even though no one has ever said that in real life when chris kattan threatens to take off his shirt, which he probably does all the time. i loathe chris kattan, although not nearly as much as i loathe andy dick who, to his credit, wrote a fucking delightfully nasty little song about chris kattan that he performed on the howard stern show a million years ago and still persists in my head to this day. the part i remember went:

chris kattan
chris kattan
you horrible little troll of a man

i still sing that to myself every time i see a movie poster for "monkeybone," which is surprisingly often.

what the hell was i talking about? oh, right, little mexican woman statue. pardon me, y'all. it's late.

BITTER/BOOKS AFTER DARK

this made me laugh hysterically. i love the off brands that make cheaper versions of the regular products that are already popular (jansport backpacks, in this instance) and their entire marketing strategy is that people won't be paying close enough attention to notice that the brand name is SLIGHTLY different, they'll just focus on the fact that it costs half as much and not notice that it's made by 9 year olds in korea (as opposed to jansport which is made by 12 year olds in bangladesh, much better).

(the preceding statements are retarded, deliberately inflammatory comments made by the author and are not indicative of the beliefs, attitudes, or opinions of any employee or authorized agent of bitter/books, LLC, any of its parent companies, or subsidiaries. for the record, though, we do love to rape goats.)

a french puzzle shaped like an italian food, made by a company named after an african antelope? what the hell, did the United Nations just take a shit in my brain?

i wish real bowling pins laughed at you and cracked jokes as you knocked them down. even though none of the things that these pins are saying on the side of the box technically qualify as "jokes." apparently the quip-masters behind this particular piece of electronic entertainment didn't quite grasp the concept. if i built this game the pins would say things like:

"a skeleton runs into a bar, and says 'give me a beer, and a mop.' a mop."

"a man is standing in line at the train station behind a priest. the priest walks up to the ticket window and tries to ask for two tickets to pittsburgh, but he stumbles on his words and asks the lady for 'two pickets to tittsburgh' instead. eventually the misunderstanding is resolved and the priest takes his tickets and sits down on a nearby bench, very very embarrased at his freudian slip. after the man purchases his tickets he walks over and sits down next to the priest, and in an attempt to comfort him says 'don't worry about it, father, people misspeak all the time. why, just the other day i was sitting at the breakfast table with my wife and i needed some salt from the other side of the table. i meant to ask her to pass the salt but instead i said 'i hate you you horrible bitch, you ruined my life.''"

or my personal favorite:

"why is a mouse when it spins?"

this is a rare occasion when i'm damn near flummoxed. this picture almost nearly speaks for itself. it's an animatronic rapping o.g. santa. complete with holiday bling, and all. bear in mind, this picture was taken in fucking AUGUST. i want to say someone actually pressed the button when i was within earshot just to see what song it was, but thankfully that memory's passed me by in the intervening months, so i couldn't say. thank god for small miracles.

i bought (sort of) these SWEET polarized aviators which i've been wearing ever since. they kind of make me look like my dad, but the older i get the more i realize that there are worse things in the world. my dad actually looks pretty damn pimping most of the time. except when he decided to start wearing uggs. i love you pops but that was, is, and always will be a mistake.

i also bought these boot shoe things which were MY SIZE FOR A CHANGE and SO money i couldn't resist. i haven't had a LOT of occasions to wear them yet, but a good pair of shoes is a good pair of shoes and i firmly believe in buying things that you grow into. not to get too soapboxy here but i really feel like that's one of the coolest things about shopping at thrift stores, is the opportunity to be confronted by something (whether it be an article of clothing, or an album, or a piece of art, or a fucking kitchen appliance or something) that really challenges you and forces you to step outside of your comfort zone. i know i might sound like i'm dressing up the emperor here but it's the god's honest truth, in my personal experience anyway - you find things you didn't think you were going to find, and they make you think about things you didn't think you were going to have to think about. it's as simple as that. i bought these shoes because i loved them (and because they were hells cheap) and i'll find occasions to wear them and if you had asked me to envision a pair of shoes that i wanted i wouldn't have picked these but i saw them and they were great and i knew they were what i wanted. does that make any sense? i hope not.

one of the really cool things this particular goodwill (on stage road out in bartlett, fast becoming the hotspot for the thrifting experience in memphis tn, much to my disdain) is all the framed stuff they have. it's priced accordingly, don't get me wrong, but it's mostly one of a kind shit, like this weird bar scene framed photograph thing. here's a closeup.

this is an amazing amazing image, and it was framed pretty well, and having spent a fair amount of time on all sides of the bar myself (in front of, behind, underneath, and on top of) i could really relate. i was sorely tempted to get it but i didn't, for a lot of reasons. it was nice to see it though, and i'm sure it's blowing up someone's wall right now somewhere, and i feel pretty good about that.

this one was a damn heartbreaker though. i've loved marilyn monroe for a long long time, and specifically the lesser-seen images of her, and this is a great one, and it was HUGE and it was really framed well, and it was fifty bucks, and i just didn't have fifty bucks. as much as i love marilyn and the immense weight that her relatively brief life carried in the popular culture of our country, the way her legacy plays itself out in every tawdry fucked in the head reality show contestant desperately yearning for self redemption and self transformation and self purification through the constant unblinking eye of fame and recognition, she wouldn't have paid fifty bucks for this picture and so neither did i.

that's all i got for this one, sweets. be back soon with another varietal probe for your parietal lobe. in the meantime...

love

d

ps

almost forgot. "the higher, the fewer." that's why a mouse is when it spins. in case you were curious.

Amvets/Salvo Danny Thomas (Special I Love Memphis Edition!)

2009-11-17T13:49:00.001-06:00

interjecting my goodwill bonanza with a special trip i took the other day with my close personal friend Kerry who runs the I Love Memphis blog for the convention and visitors bureau, along with various and sundry other internet points of interest.

before we hit the stores though we hit another one of my favorite things about memphis - the lunch buffet at pho binh on madison ave, right in the heart of midtown.

5.19 for all the lemongrass tofu, egg rolls and fried chicken you can eat. noms.

oh, and here was my fortune. would it turn out to be true? LET'S FIND OUT!

then it was off to the races, with the requisite enlivening jaunt down elvis presley blvd to the amvets store, one of the brightest jewels in the sparkling crown of awesome that is the memphis thrift store scene.

i wasn't really in the market for much of anything, shopping-wise, so i was pretty much free to wander around with my camera and gawk at shit, which is of course my favorite thing to do in the world, with pants on anyway. take, for example, this GIGANTIC old tower computer, had to be at least 2 1/2 feet tall. the phrase "old clock tower" kept popping into my head when i was looking at this particular arrangement, and it made me think of back to the future and giggle to a degree that is perhaps unbecoming of a gentleman, but whatevs. i think the shit is funny.

my best friend's mom had one of these when i was a little kid, and i always thought it was the coolest thing. odd, to think they're basically useless now that network tv only broadcasts in digital. it makes me want to buy one even more now, just as an art object or some kind of memorial. strange to stop and notice how much the world's changed, just in my lifetime. i've mentioned this elsewhere before, but i mean we had a rotary phone in the house i grew up in. my best friend's phone number ended in zero and i remember thinking it was such a pain in the ass to wait for the thing to go all the way back around after you dialed the zero, and now i can send him a text message from my phone while i browse the internet and listen to podcasts in my car. a kid who's born today is never going to be able to imagine what the world was like even 20 years ago. when phonebooks actually mattered, when there were like thirty channels on the tv and you were just BLOWN AWAY by the variety of things that were available to watch, when the phrase "Be kind, rewind" wasn't just a delightful anachronism or the title of a movie. god, i sound like such a codger.

i'm not a hundred percent positive what this thing is, exactly, or what it's supposed to do, but look!

there are two! his and hers, a matched pair! [nerd]i kind of like them because they look like r2d2 a little bit and he's my favorite droid. what's YOUR favorite droid?[/nerd]

something so poignant about a big pack of off-brand adult diapers ending up at a thrift store. this is by far NOT the first pack of adult diapers i've ever seen in my secondhand journeys, but something about the fact that they're a knockoff of Depends, and the fact that the package is open, and the way there were just kind of sitting there... i don't know. touching. and, gross.

poop is gross.

okay so i was walking home from work the other night and i was about halfway up the block on auburndale when i saw this cat kind of slowly stalking across the street - it's about 11:15 pm - and it looked kind of weird, that it was moving that slow, and when i got closer i could see that it was haranguing this tiny little mouse that was terrified and running for its life, and i used to have a pet mouse when i was a kid (Luis Bonfa was his name. eccentric child, i was.) so that shit was not EVEN going to fly so i yell "HEY!" at this cat and it kind of stops and looks over its shoulder at me but then goes right back to batting at this poor little mouse so i take off at a dead run, stomping my feet and growling at this cat, who sees me coming and (rightly so) bolts back to the other side of the street. i wasn't going to hit it or anything, mind you, just trying to shoo it away. so it eventually gets the picture and takes off, meanwhile this teensy little gray mouse with the BIGGEST eyes you have ever seen in your life is still running full tilt, understandably just as scared of me as it was of the cat, maybe even moreso, so i start following it, kind of trying to herd it along the back side of the midtown pharmacy building into some bushes or something, somewhere where the cat wouldn't just be able to come back and find it as soon as i left, when it occurs to me that i might rather fancy a little pet to take care of and keep me company again, but i wasn't about to grab at it and run the risk of contracting mouse aids or whatever it would give me when it inevitably bit my hand, and all i had to snare it with was a small brown paper bag from work, and i couldn't get close enough to get the bag in front of it, so i had to settle for shepherding (mousherding i guess) it into the bushes of the next building over, and calling it a night. anyway i saw this cage and it made me think of that. my almost rescue mouse.

that's right, you're seeing that correctly. that, me hearties, is a vase cozy. no further comment.

the detail picture of the plaque didn't come out (cameras are hard, durr) but this is a CONTEST RUNNER UP THE CRYSTAL PALACE trophy which my partner in crime for the day informed me is a skating rink on south 3rd street (did i mention she's in the roller derby too? lady problems, woot!), and it occurred to me that i would like to go to that place, as they say. the last time i put on a pair of roller skates i got SEVERELY injured (without even falling down, at that!) but one never really loses one's enthusiasm, once you come down with skate fever. ask anyone.

also saw these MURDEROUS doc martens steel toed boots of death and killing and rrrraaaahhhhh!!!! they were kind of my size but you have to murder people when you put them on and that's just not my style, people. wow, i think i just wrote a steven king novel. "boots that make you kill people." 8000 pages of bullshit later, and you've got yourself a bestseller, baby!

these, on the other hand, are SO my style, but unfortunately not my size. what is it with people and their tiny feet? i mean, come on!

i even glanced at a few books, although i fear the gods will strike me down if i chanced to purchase one and introduced it into the burbling cauldron of nightmares that is my apartment right now. un example:

much love to the extremely talented amie vanderford for that portrait, by the way.

i'm was all set to laugh scornfully at this tape and its proletarian ambitions, and then i suddenly remembered that when i was a little kid i wanted to be a truck driver too. i think i just liked CB radios. and meth.

one of those things... if you need a tape to tell you how to do it, you probably shouldn't do it. for the love of god, who bought this? who MADE it?

requisite picture of piles of moldy 8 track tapes. i kind of tune this stuff out most of the time, partially because i see it at every store i go to, and also because i tried to get into 8 tracks once back in the day because they're everywhere and they're so cheap, and i discovered a problem - the magnetic tape they used back in the day is about one molecule thick and prone to breaking at the slightest provocation, in addition to the fact that they sound like shit. so no 8 tracks for me, thanks. for some reason i noticed them today though. there's some rockin' good stuff in this pile! boston, barry manilow, bette midler... that's what i'm talkin about.

this i was tempted by, though. i like a little piaf every now and again. who doesn't?

perhaps a little schmilsson to go with your piaf?

or maybe you're more of a loggins and messina type. i'm not. in fact i'm probably more of a "murder loggins and messina with a hatchet and burn all their music so i never have to listen to any of it ever again" type. i love that this is a live tape, too. "man, their studio stuff is okay, but the live show's where it's at. they totally jam out "listen to a country song" for like 20 minutes! yeah!"

this picture doesn't do it justice but these are all videotapes of church services. except "the making of star wars," of course. although i suppose that's kind of a religious experience for some people. nerds, that is. big ole nerdy nerd nerds.

this is just creepy, on so many levels.

remember these damn troll things? god, they were everywhere back in the day! keychains, stuck to the windows of people's cars... there was no escape. now, not so much. this one apparently loves the buffalo bills. go figure.

then it was off to the salvation army on danny thomas blvd, another local favorite of mine, even if getting in and out of the parking lot can be kind of a nightmare sometimes.

we found mark and scott, residing comfortably on the shelf in domestic bliss, or whatever the closest equivalent would be for personalized coffee cups. but all is not as it seems, in coffee cup land. suddenly, a knock at the door.

IT'S ANN! "Mark, Scott, I have some news. I'm pregnant. It's yours."

Mark: Gasp!
Scott: You bitch! How could you?
Mark: [faints]
Scott: Wait, is it mine, or his?
Ann: ...both!

DUNT DUN DUNNNN..... Join us next time for the shocking conclusion of PERSONALIZED COFFEE CUP LOVE TRIANGLE THEATER!

i could see the ebay listing as soon as i picked this thing up: L@@K VINTAGE SLAP CHOP VINCE SHLOMI BILLY MAYS ANTIQUE NO RESERVE BID NOW!!!!!!!! I was tempted, not gonna lie.

kerry and i both remarked on how delightfully color coded all the dishes and kitchen ware always are at the salvation army - one of the nice touches you find in the bigger stores in town (goodwills, etc) is that added degree of organization. of course you lose a little bit of the haphazard, "just throw it anywhere" kind of charm that is essential to the thrifting experience, but trust me when i say a little bit of that goes a long way after a while, if that makes any sense.

i mean they even arranged these neat little too-big-to-be-a-shotglass, too-small-to-be-a-cocktail-glass, not-the-right-shape-for-a-cordial-glass glasses in a neat little row! there were 11 of them and they were a buck a piece and that is great.

this was a totally sweet vintage pepsi clock for FOUR BUCKS that admittedly needed a little bit of repair (loose hands, don'tcha know) but was eminently fixable and i seriously considered it, but for the fact that all the walls in my apartment are plaster and i'm too lazy to bother with anchors to hang stuff so it kind of looks like a crazy person lives there and i've become strangely comfortable with that so i don't want to mess up my design scheme. also i don't need a clock.

since i just recently ranted about my freakishly large head in my last post i'll give it a pass here and just say that i had one of these silhouette things done for me when i was a kid too and it was a lot bigger than this. that is all.

black jesus does not want you to be afraid. no problem!

i bet these boots would help you not to be afraid.

and then it was time to try on hats. who could resist?

we probably looked like a couple of idiots standing all the way at the back of the store photographing a shelf full of hats like we were howard carter in tutankhamun's crypt or something, but i mean come on. these were just too perfect.

i could tell kerry really wanted this one, but i told her she looked like balloon boy and i think that put her off it a little bit. my bad, homey.

i picked this little french number up for a special someone

and kerry ended up with this snazzy little leopard skin pillbox thing, which i think suits her to a t.

and that'll just about do it for this special I Love Memphis themed edition of bitter/books. much thanks to kerry for giving me the impetus to get up off my ass again and start going out and writing and stuff, and make sure and check out the I Love Memphis Blog, become a fan on facebook, get your picture taken with the sign, hell, go nuts, get a tattoo or something. have fun with it. i'll talk to you next time, lovelies.

your pal

d

p.s. this week's post was written by David and edited (sort of) by David, who, upon completing it, had a cup of coffee, walked to the post office, then went to work.

Goodwill Bonanza pt 1/3

2009-11-16T10:57:00.000-06:00

i went nuts at 3 goodwills in one day a couple months ago. here are some highlights.

vintage board games always tickle me pink. i find the suggestion that playing the game "operation" requires any real measure of anything that could be described as "skill" rather ludicrous, but i'll let it slide because the box is adorable looking. i wish actual surgery was half this cool, i'd be in the hospital every other fucking week. why can i not shake the nagging certainty that everyone involved in the design and construction of this game was just CONSTANTLY ripped to the tits? was everyone pretty much hammered all the time back in 1965? i'd like to think so. it was a gentler age.

i'm not gonna lie, it's been like three months since i took these pictures, and i really can't remember why i photographed this. it's a whole bunch of plastic flowers, that much is for sure. sure is a whole lotta plastic flowers. moving on.

too broke for jenga? try this crap!

this is so money it should be confiscated by the secret service. i wanted to high five it. it brings all the boys to the yard. chuck norris only wishes. it's my dad.

this first batch of pictures was taken at the goodwill out on austin peay in bartlett - nice place, and like most of the suburban goodwills it's the size of a fucking airplane hangar, high ceilings and all, and i guess in lieu of any real HVAC system they use these industrial size blast fans to keep the air moving around in there during the warmer months (even though it wasn't on when i took this picture). they used to have one almost this size at the goodwill on highland over by the university, which always made me laugh because that store is the size of a walk in closet compared to the behemoths out in the boonies and when they would turn the fan on it would be so loud that everyone working in the front half of the store would have to scream at earsplitting volume just to be able to hear each other, and the women's clothes up by the front would basically be flapping sideways in the wind like flags in a fucking hurricane, small children would just go flying if they meandered in the path of the fan, etc... priceless. anyway.

FOR A VERY IMPORTANT PERSON'S HAT, in case you were curious. i've never wanted to own a top hat so badly in my fucking life. i guess i just want a hat that's important enough to deserve its own box, or case. full disclosure, i have kind of a huge melon head and it's a royal pain in the ass for me to find a decent fitting hat most of the time, so i generally avoid the subject altogether, except in very specific instances, one of which you'll be seeing in a minute.

my most ridiculous hat-related story (not that you asked) concerns a trip to london to visit a friend of mine who was spending a year abroad while we were both in college. for some stupid reason i had fixated on finding a nice bowler hat for myself while i was over there, kind of as a trophy or a souvenir of my journey, and partially just because i wanted a hat like that real bad. anyway after wasting lord only knows how much time that i could have spent in the pubs traipsing around london in an increasingly vain and futile search for this fucking thing, i finally found a hat shop on the high street that carried bowlers in the ludicrously big sizes that i needed, only to find that even the LARGEST ONE THEY HAD IN THE STORE didn't quite cover my gargantuan cranium in the appropriate manner, but they offered to TAKE IT IN THE BACK FOR ME AND STRETCH IT OUT which i was simultaneously appalled and touched by, so i went ahead and did that and even when they brought it back it STILL DIDN'T FIT but i was so embarrassed by that point that i bought it anyway, also because i had like five people with me and i was totally on the spot and it was awful. not to mention that it cost like 200 bucks (i'm not kidding) and every time i wore it (i kept it for years, mostly out of embarrassment) it left a huge red streak across my forehead from where the band would dig into my flesh. it got irretrievably dented one time while i was moving from apartment to various apartment, and i threw it away. i didn't exactly shed tears over that one.

what the hell was i talking about? oh, right. check out evil santa over here. kind of seasonally appropriate now, but bear in mind again that i took these pictures in august. makes it even a little more creepy, i think.

i love when this stuff ends up in thrift stores. there's a story here that i'll never get to know, but i know that it exists regardless and i love that fact. i love that they chose to brand a blood pressure pump with boner pills. i can imagine this thing being used in association with its endorsing product in so many various, sundry, silly ways that i'm smiling to myself right now just at the prospect. i can't explain it, i guess. it's just great.

so here's the hat i mentioned earlier. there was a brief period this past summer when i thought i was going to be moving to the country next year (and probably eating a lot of peaches, yes) to more or less live off the land - long story. anyway i figured my usual togs weren't going to cut it (2 piece suit not really being farm-appropriate clothing, natch) so my wardrobe took a sharp left turn in favor of western shirts and sturdier things like that, including a decent sized straw hat so i wouldn't bake in the sun. laugh all you want (i know i would) but i was really serious about this for a while and it would have made perfect sense to have a hat like this if i was really going to be outside working in the garden on hot wisconsin afternoons. i still wish i was going to be doing that.

i think i look pretty damn good in this fucking hat. farmer dave, over here. i've still got it.

this was odd, although i did a poor job of highlighting the part of the picture you need to look at, which is that blue piece of paper taped to the front of the subwoofer on this multi-dvd changer player home entertainment system thing. it's a print out of the product listing from panasonic's web site - this might be getting into a little bit more of the minutiae of the ins and outs of the internal workings of the goodwill organization than most of you are probably interested in, but when you spend as much time in these stores as i do you can't help but start to wonder what's going on behind the scenes. i'd be lying if i said i'd never considered trying to get a job at one of these places just to see what it looks like from the other side (and also for the sweet discount, if there is one), although i think if i had to listen to that much WRVR i'd probably shoot myself and a couple other people too. anyway i just could not for the life of me parse out if they had done this after this thing had been donated, like to verify its value or justify the price tag they'd put on it, or if it had come that way from wherever it was donated from, or what exactly the whole story was with that. like i said, probably not the most fascinating thing in the world to most folks, but it caught my eye, only because i couldn't quite figure it out, i suppose.

also don't know why i took a picture of this. lots of vcrs and shit! wow!

stuff like this always makes me think of the massive landfills full of old disused computer components that are steadily accumulating in places like China. last i heard they'd taken to just burning the shit, which, yeah, that's a real neat idea. don't know what else to do with all this plastic and metal and circuitry? let's fucking set it on fire! that ALWAYS works out for the best! ah, china. just because you're like the oldest civilization on the planet doesn't mean you DON'T have your head up your ass too.

i wanted this so damn bad, partially to use on the farm (we already have one, though) and partially just because you never see these things. know what it is? it's a drill. it's a hand crank drill, you hold the middle and put a bit in the chuck on the bottom and crank the top and voila! that's how they did it before power tools. i think that is so rugged and badass and even though i'd use an electric drill 100 times out of 100 if i had the choice, i still respect this stuff do damn much. i've probably babbled on at length about this before but i spent my summers as a kid with my folks out in the middle of nowhere in west central WI where we had this land with cabins and stuff and no electricity or plumbing or phones or whatever and it really instilled a kind of "what do you do when the power goes out" mentality in me that persists to this day. like i said, i'm no technophobe and if gadgets or power tools or whatever make my life easier then i say rah rah and hooray to that, but there's always this kind of fallback thing in my head of how to get by without all the trappings and conveniences that most folks (myself included, from time to time) take for granted. don't get me wrong, in no way do i think that those tendencies are any kind of measure of depth or quality of someone's personality, i find nothing more tedious than people who think an interest in "going back to the land" automatically puts you right up there with Thoreau in terms of insight and realness... it's just something about me that makes me really like drills.

AWW DO I HAVE TO? YOU MAKE ME SAY NO TO EVERYTHING!

further adventures in very confusing things - 5 bamboo tubes, of varying length and thickness, all slightly cracked. they don't appear to have ever had any practical purpose, although the fact that they're all cracked makes me think that someone donated them after they started to crack, which meant they were no longer useful as whatever they were being used as before, which means at some point they DID have a function, which is of course impossible, so therefore i conclude that nothing is everything and existence is meaningless and it's time for a cocktail. "Socrates' Conundrum," they called that one in philosophy class, if memory serves.

oh it was TORTURE trying to figure out whether or not to buy this thing! me and the partner in crime must have stood there for 15 minutes trying to parse out whether or not this was worth jumping on. it's a pot rack, the kind you hang from the ceiling on chains, in case you were wondering, and it was more or less sturdy and more or less intact but in the end we decided to pass and i think we did the right thing, it wasn't quite exactly what we were looking for at the time and things have changed since then anyway so i'm glad we didn't get it, but you know what it's like when you totally sweat something forever and then you see something that's KIND OF exactly what you're looking for but not quite but it's really cheap so you think you should get it anyway just because how often do you ever see these damn things to begin with? yeah, that's what it was like. god, it was awful though, the deliberation! even looking at this picture hurts. gaaaah!

also passed on - badass labeled mason jars. the rubber was a little crusty looking and i realized you can get lighter, cheaper, better containers at your local restaurant supply emporium anyway that don't have labels on them so i passed. these are still pretty pimp though, jars that have the BALLS to tell YOU what to put in THEM! i wish more kitchen ware would stand up for itself like that.

i did get these however. really heavy duty thick lined winter boots are kind of a rarity in this part of the country and even though i'm probably not off to the woods any more i'm still glad i have these because aside from the sweet combat boots i got at beloved value village in houston several years ago i really don't have any "sturdy" footwear, so the next time there's a blizzard (could happen) i'll be all set in the shoe dept. good to know.

yeah, kind of a "camping" theme to this particular outing, in case you hadn't noticed. these could just as easily double as neat little porch or patio chairs, though. cheap, too.

also kind of a "nasty roof runoff rainwater in a bucket" theme to this particular outing, although i suppose that's really more of a recurring theme through many of my journeys to secondhand stores, all across this great nation of ours (including hawaii). whatever. weeds out the weak-willed, more goodies for me.

i'm feeling especially loquacious today for some godforsaken reason so i'm gonna cut it off here and pick up with the next goodwill (pt 2 of 3) when i've got a little more time and wherewithal to do it justice. in the meantime...

this one goes out to the one i love.

take care of yourself kids

d

Community Dolla Warehouse

2009-08-28T00:01:00.000-05:00

sorry about the lapse, i've been up to a few things. anyway, back to the lecture at hand.

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

CLOT FURN HOU... i mean... amvets presley blvd

2009-08-07T00:38:00.002-05:00

sorry, the picture threw me off. back at the amvets on presley blvd. hilarity ensues.

this is all this shirt said. if it hadn't been such a butt ugly font and a shoddy iron on decal, i might have picked it up. it has a zen master, whack on the head with a bamboo stick quality to it that i can really get behind.

this, i cannot get behind, cute though it is. who would actually cook on this thing (notice the previous owner did not)? it just doesn't look like something real food should go on, or come off of. i keep picturing like those little fake plastic breakfast sausage patty things they give you with hasbro's "my first play oven!" or something. actually that's kind of making me hungry. is that weird?

what the hell, people. if you need a BOX and INSTRUCTIONS on how to play fucking CHARADES, just give it up. pack it in, you fail at life. i'm not arguing the point that it's not a "well-known party game," in fact i guess that's kind of my central thesis here - it's probably the MOST well known party game, EVER. you act out a word or phrase and people guess what it is. there. i just saved you the trouble of opening the box. who bought this? was it part of some competition to be named "the dullest family ever?" i mean i like charades, actually a lot more than most people do, i just... instructions? really?

this was amazing. this is a damn hair dryer that comes in its own suitcase. it should come with a bumper sticker too that just says "I AM VERY IMPORTANT" so people driving behind you in traffic can tell too. saves you the trouble of pulling out the hair dryer all the time. if i bought this (not that it occurred to me to buy it, even for a moment) i would stamp VERY IMPORTANT PERSON'S HAIR DRYER on the side, just so everyone was clear on that point.

hehehey, if it isn't the buttmaster! i actually see these damn things all the time, i don't know why i just now started finding them photo-worthy. did the word "butt" just suddenly become funny like last month or something? i always got the impression it was kind of an old saw. what do i know

everything about this makes me laugh. why... just, why? why a silly little lacquered wooden bar for your lipstick to begin with? and was it necessary to somehow signify that it came from Atlanta, GA? are they known for their lipstick? or their tiny pieces of carved wood? or their lacquer? so classy. this is just the epitome of class.

one of my favorite things about this store has always been the "snack area" right up front by the changing rooms. it baffles me, somewhat. there's a completely arbitrary smattering of vending machines and a couple old arcade games just kind of thrown over next to the front counter, like people are going to come in there and hang out or something. there's an old-ass Play-Choice 10 machine, one of the ones that came with 10 8-bit nintendo games on it, which i love, but unfortunately the joystick's broken, so i never play it. it's a delightful soundtrack to the shopping experience though, little snippets of the soundtracks to super mario brothers 3 and baseball stars while you browse the pantsuits. periodically they'll switch out one silly old vending machine for another. this adorably small coke machine was new. it's mini!

this confuses and frightens me somewhat. i googled "tom hess" and the first thing i got was this

which is pretty awesome, but i don't think it's the same guy. maybe it is! i'd be interested in reading his book a lot more if it was. maybe he shreds that hard because he loves jesus or he's trying to shred the jews back to israel or something. that would be pretty amazing. as it stands i guess this is his thing here although i didn't read much about it - i do like the fact that the name kind of sounds like IHOP. the "wheel of cities" is pretty fun and wacky too.

as long as we're on the topic, here's "party picnic jesus' guide to outdoor entertaining." this kind of looks like he's watching approvingly as these youngsters get ready to get it on underneath the ol' tree next to the lake! jesus nooo!!! "desire of ages," eh? i guess "he taught love" in the most direct, immediate fashion possible, eh? "that's it... compliment her eyes, they love that shit... awww, yeah."

i don't know why i found this so amusing. horseshoe crab: the book. finally, after all these years, the story can be told. i fully, honestly expected to open up this book and just find page after page of the same illustration... "the horseshoe crab sits on its ass at the bottom of a large body of water." "the horseshoe crab moves slightly to the left, then continues sitting on its ass at the bottom of a large body of water." i guess it was some sort of children's educational book. i don't know. i find horseshoe crabs to be fundamentally horrifying, visually, and would just assume see them boiling in a pot (edible? i don't know) or flung back out into outer space (where they clearly belong) than traipsing around on the same planet as me, taking up space at the bottom of large bodies of water that could be used for perfectly good dirt and whatnot.

god love billy idol. workin' that pout for all it's worth. this isn't even the album that has any of his memorable (generously speaking) songs on it, but he's just up there poutin' away, without a care. according to a bit of barely substantiated internet lore, james cameron actually wanted him to play the t-1000 character (robert patrick's) in terminator 2, but some sort of nasty motorcycle accident prevented him from doing so. try as i might, i really cannot picture t2 as a functional film with this scowling poncy dickweed as the technological superbeast from the future. i see a malnourished british man with a shitty dye job and i do not think "unstoppable killing machine," i just think... i don't know... take some vitamins, motherfucker. drink some oj. brush your teeth. calm down.

holy shit. literally. take a look. sister motherfucking cantaloupe.

snagged this rather snazzy decorative life preserver thing, which i was all set to buy before i even noticed that it came from...

galvatraz, baby! my former place of residence! gtown night riders represent! VERY cool.

that's about all i got. roll credits.

ps here are some gratuitous videos of insane guitar shredding

d

The MIFA Store

2009-07-31T20:47:00.004-05:00

The MIFA store's really looking great these days. I mentioned that they were overhauling the place a little while back, but I hadn't had a chance to stop in and check it out until just a little while ago.

They REALLY cleaned up and cleared out a bunch of old merchandise and clothes and stuff, and straightened out some of the more confusing elements of the layout and pricing scheme of the place.

And while you run the risk during a process like that of losing some of the dingy charm that makes the secondhand experience so magical, I would venture to say that the other thrift stores in this town definitely have enough of that to make up for the MIFA store deciding to clean up its act a little bit.

Anyway, they still have the requisite "huge barrel of crutches and bed frame pieces" so I'm going to go ahead and say they're basically keeping it real.

The mrs. nabbed this snazz-tacular electric waffle iron (for making electric waffles, don'tcha know) for the low low price of $5 - it's so deco!

This is a first, I think, in any thrift store I've ever been in. An honest to goodness little reading nook. Granted, it's just a chair next to some rolling shelves, and the huge warehouse-sized incandescent lights they use to illuminate the place would probably boil your eyes out of your skull if you tried to read under them for longer than, say, 5 minutes, but it's the thought that counts here people, for reals.

Now here's something you don't see every day. Honestly I wouldn't have had any clue what it even was, if the good people in the back room hadn't thought to label it (much appreciated). It is, a phone stand. Like for when people actually had phones in their homes, and sat next to them while they talked. The thing on the bottom is for your phone book. I'd never seen one of these before, and I found it so charming and anachronistic that I almost bought it just on principle, but alas, I know I'll never have a home phone again, let alone a delightful little chair to sit on next to my stand while I chat my afternoon away. Ah, the joys of a bygone era.

I had my buddy Mike put his iPhone on top of it while I took this picture, just to illuminate how far we've come in the intervening decades since this thing was undoubtedly lovingly crafted by hand. Ladies and gentlemen... progress.

Do you know the muffin man? I do, and he's FUCKING ADORABLE. His name is Charles Q. Popover and he is full of treats. If you find him and introduce yourself politely, in the manner befitting a gentle man or a lady, he will kindly grant you one wish. I wished for a candy bar, and after I left the MIFA store I went to a gas station and bought myself a candy bar, so I guess my wish was sort of granted. God bless you Charles Q. Popover.

The MIFA store always has all this crazy industrial shit, I have no idea where it comes from. Whatever they can't fit in the store they set out on the back loading dock... pianos, refrigerators, all sorts of big furniture and crap like that. I guess since they rearranged, they have more room for stuff like this humongous industrial rack fridge, presumably for catering or something like that. $150.

They also have a sort of "boutique" section right up near the front - jewelry case, slightly nicer clothes, nothing too staggeringly expensive, but stuff that probably couldn't be lumped in with the $4 dresses and $5 coats. These glasses were, in fact, very nice.

BITTER/BOOKS GETS POLITICAL: DISCUSS.

On second thought keep it to yourself.

Go see the MIFA store, kids. It's looking pretty snazzy, and you don't have to drive out to the uncharted wildernesses of Bartlett or Presley Blvd to get there. It's a local charity organization, they work hard to do good things in the community and they're really trying to put together the best store they can. Let's encourage them. Check out their blog. There's an email list. Get involved. You'll be glad you did.

Talk to you later

D

Salvation Army Danny Thomas

2009-07-28T00:00:00.004-05:00

i may have mentioned this before at some point, but did you know they have rankings and titles in the salvation army, just like in the actual military army? that's right, with time, patience, dedication, and training, you can rise to the rank of major, lieutenant, colonel... hell, even vice admiral (not actually) of the lord's own fucking army! now, granted, you can't drink, smoke, gamble, or marry anyone outside of the organization (creepy?), but you know... trade offs. anyway. here is one of their thrift stores.

this one was a gimme. my wife drinks coffee out of it at work now. how could you say no?

IT EVEN HAS A NAME. AND! it says "GAY 8" on the bottom, for reasons which are happily unbeknownst to all involved. regardless, wayne gay 8 is a fantastic coffee cup. this is kind of the epitome of the type of thing that makes me wonder if people who don't shop at thrift stores have any idea what they're missing. this is a skull coffee cup named wayne gay 8. it cost, oh, i don't know, a buck, maybe. something like that. you want to show me another store, anywhere, where you could buy that, for any price?

his hair is shaped the same as his butt cheeks. this captures all the drama, passion, intensity, and butt cheek shape of a real actual bullfight, i imagine, without the whole hideous depressing spectacle of a bunch of assholes in ugly outfits spearing a fucking defenseless animal before basically taunting it and killing it in front of several thousand cheering other assholes.

i wish this happened at every match.

i wish this was happening in the street outside my apartment RIGHT FUCKING NOW

ahhh... magical outer space love unicorns, you are a soothing balm to me, as always. i don't honestly know what my favorite part of this picture is. the symmetric nature of the composition? the fact that they're touching horns in front of what appears to be a heart shaped black hole? that people feel compelled to SIGN pieces like this with their own personal names? i just can't decide. oh well.

so ok. here's a pretty remarkable find, in and of itself. all this pampered chef shit is pretty high-end, quality stoneware that will last the rest of your life if you take care of it. i came across one of these exact guys a couple years ago for extremely cheap, and have used the crap out of it ever since, so i was super pumped to see another one. so i'm gawking at it, throwing it in my cart, taking pictures and basically having a little shit fit over on my own when my goodly wife calls over to me from a few feet away: "hey, holy shit, check this out." i, interrupted mid-geek out, respond with my usual snarky impatience "HANG ON THIS IS AMAZING AND I'M TAKING PICTURES OF IT, WHATEVER IT IS THAT YOU HAVE OVER THERE THAT'S SO COOL AND IMPORTANT WILL HAVE TO WAIT" (i talk in all caps when i'm annoyed) and when i finally catch my breath again what i do see over yonder but this:

for those of you keeping score at home, that's two of these, one of these, and one of these, all new, untouched, never used, for no more than like five or six bucks a piece, i think. total cost, shipping NOT included, from the pampered chef website: 149.50. total cost from the good people at salvation army? about 32 bucks. you BET we bought them all.

i don't want to make it seem like finds like this are an everyday occurrence. i hope regular readers of this internet thrift focused blogging space (if there are any of you left) will have figured out by now that for every profoundly successful and rewarding trip out into the great secondhand unknown, there are at least as many times when you come home empty handed, having seen nothing but a bunch of ill-fitting clothes, sniveling toddlers, and yanni-centric mixtapes, but with time, dedication, and patience, you will inevitably come across a few gold mines every now and then, provided you have eyes to see. this is indisputably one of them. you're talking about basically a lifetime supply of REALLY high quality stoneware for less than 1/4 of the total cost from the manufacturer, MUCH less if you factor in shipping. that is just insane.

i'd now like to follow up that halfway lucid, cogent argument for the value of exploring the secondhand market with this silly, pointless picture of my good friend mk holding a ceramic unicorn. we're all about balance here at bitter/books LLC, you people should know that by now.

for many years i did not believe that the road runner was an actual creature that existed in nature. i don't know why, i suppose i blame the people at warner brothers for making it hard for my eight year old mind to believe in some magical being that spent all its life running from coyotes and disappearing into a cloud of dust and running into mountains that had tunnel murals painted on the side of them by the aforementioned resourceful coyotes, all in some twisted, malformed, single minded search for birdseed? who could be expected to believe in that? apparently they are a real thing though, real enough to make a kitschy ceramic coffee mug about, at least.

no great surprise, but my sympathies have been mostly for wile e. during the bulk of my life, something about the constantly frustrated struggle of this poor creature just trying to secure himself some sustenance, subjected to the most unimaginably painful tortures again and again, without even the sweet release of death to salve his suffering, all at his own hand, as a result of his own actions, just clicked with me, on whatever level. wile e. coyote as sisyphus, as tantalus, as damocles, as diogenes. as orpheus. i'm reaching, but you get the idea. anyway.

fake feet! wtf? what do you do with fake feet, one might be compelled to ask?

well i guess you put your real feet on them. you got any better ideas? they actually fit my real wife's real feet too, which is kind of creepy. foot fetish enthusiasts, have at it. on second thought, don't. you perverts.

bought this, to no one's great surprise.

that's all. until next time, in the words of the bard -

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

d

Goodwill Austin Peay

2009-07-24T01:20:00.004-05:00

had another delightful romp through the herman j. goodwill store on austin peay highway not too long ago.

i'm a sucker for novelty shot glasses, always have been, even ones like this that are actually kind of a pain in the ass to drink out of. this horse is just so fucking cute, i can scarcely resist the urge to fill his head full of bourbon and drink out of it! surely i can't be the only person who feels that way.

further proof that the playboy corporation has probably put their logo on every single item known to man by this point. lighters, t-shirts, mudflaps... why not oversized ceramic travel muggish looking things, too? i ask you, why not? damn, looking at this picture now, for two bucks, i really should have bought this thing. oh well, non-buyer's remorse i guess, always stings a little harder. i guess i just find the whole playboy "brand" such a laughable self-parody by this point that my initial reaction whenever i see anything bearing the bunny ears is always "eww, no," even though this is sort of tasteful and cool, not to mention useful, and it hearkens back to an era when ol' hef's cultural monolith seemed to stand for something a little more substantial than silicon, smoking jackets, and limp lifestyle branding. maybe i'm a little delusional.

AMERICA HAS SPOKEN, AND...

IT WANTS ITS RELISH. your guess is as good as mine as to what these two things have to do with each other. the perfect christmas gift for that friend or family member who loves democracy... and relish. personally i rather lean towards the "Monarchy Mustard" container, or even the "Communism Catsup," but really i'll take any system of societal organization that can easily be paired with a popular hot dog topping. the sauerkraut of serfdom, anyone?

stumbled across two of these righteous little table lamps, which my wife immediately snapped up and is currently artifying in her own inimitable fashion... if you're curious as to what that might look like, just picture the lamp you see here covered in desiccated bird skeletons and yellowed illustrations from old medical textbooks.

just funnin' with you, dearest. fear not, i'll keep bringing you the carcasses if you keep making them pretty.

love you. don't kill me for sharing your work with the masses... if nothing else, you'd be the most obvious suspect.

i LOVE isaac asimov. while i haven't exactly read volumes of his shit, i've liked everything i've ever encountered of his, be it in the printed word, adapted for radio, bastardized into film... you name it. i think the 20th century will be remembered as an era in which our imaginations took us farther ahead, faster, and into stranger places than any previous time in human history, and few people in the 20th century had an imagination or an intelligence to rival asimov's. his whole body of work, his whole life story (along with guys like heinlein and vonnegut) makes me unspeakably happy to be the complete and utter nerd that i am. i mean, look at this guy.

are you telling me you wouldn't want to get a beer with this guy? if for no other reason than to ask him what was up with the whole super quiz thing? i know i would.

this was a pleasant surprise. the d'aulaires' books on norse and greek mythology were SUCH a huge part of my childhood, i always sort of meant to look for more of their work, but i never really got around to it. anyone with kids, or in a position to buy gifts for kids occasionally (aunts and uncles, i'm looking at you here), if you've never seen any of their work, do yourself a favor and check it out. if the kid in question has even the slightest fraction of a brain in their head, they'll glom on to all of this stuff (especially the greek and norse mythology books) and never let go.

i believe it was actually a time/life set, but this reminded me so much of those silly commercials from the 80's that i had to take a picture of it. you remember what i'm talking about? "JOIN NOW AND RECEIVE OUR FIRST VOLUME: MYSTERIES OF THE UNEXPLAINED. FUTURE VOLUMES WILL FOLLOW AT THE LOW COST OF 19.95 PER BOOK, CANCEL ANY TIME," blah blah blah. those (and the ominous narration of Robert Stack on Unsolved Mysteries) used to scare the living shit out of little eight year old me.

meanwhile, 28 year old me is only now realizing the painful redundancy built into this title. think about it for a second...

ALL MYSTERIES ARE UNEXPLAINED. that's why they call them MYSTERIES. if they were EXPLAINED, there wouldn't be any MYSTERY any more.

"ORDER NOW AND RECEIVE OUR SECOND VOLUME: BIZARRE PHENOMENA, FOR NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE. SHIPPING AND HANDLING MAY APPLY. CALL NOW."

you want to see some bizarre phenomena? check out the fucking size of this spider we saw on the trash can outside. puts a daddy longlegs to shame, i tell you.

oh, right, we're still sort of talking about thrift stores here, aren't we, in the breaks in between lengthy diatribes about science fiction authors i slavishly adore and things that used to scare me when i was a little kid? well in that case check out this BALLIN' player piano (kurt vonnegut wrote a book called player piano which i read and liked - sorry, i couldn't help it) for christ, i don't know, like 100, 200 bucks i think. i have honestly never seen one of these things for sale before, and it's interesting, for as long as i've been doing this and as much one of a kind shit as i've seen, i still get those moments from time to time where your rational mind, which is saying, you know, "there's no place for you to put this, you can't really afford it, you have no way of even getting it home from the store" is just completely shouted down by that screaming voice in the forefront of your mind going OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD IT'S A FUCKING PLAYER PIANO BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT NOW DAMMIT but thankfully i know enough to take a few deep breaths, collect myself, maybe go into a quiet bathroom stall and cry a little, then leave the damn thing behind, which is what i did.

...[sniff]...

i fucked up, didn't i.

yeah, i did.

d

Salvation Army Austin Peay

2009-07-22T19:08:00.006-05:00

we ventured out on a bucolic, picturesque afternoon not too long ago to a favorite destination, the salvation army (is it bad that i always type it "slavation army" at first?) on austin peay highway. we rolled three deep that day:

spousal unit, myself, and dearest friend michael from back in the day, who was in town for a week of debauchery and friendship. odd, how often those two things seem to go hand in hand. i digress.

the selection was fairly well bangin', as usual, and i picked up a few sweet finds, like this t-shirt from the bellevue student ministry, which i saw and immediately realized i could tweak just slightly with the judicious application of some white out, to suit my philosophical outlook somewhat better. so this shirt you see pictured above, with one deft stroke of liquid paper, was transformed from

"WHY GOD?"

to

"WHY, GOD?"

which as i said suits me much better. i also like how for whatever reason, everything colored white in the above photograph decided to glow fucking super brightly, lending the whole thing an added air of holiness. i'm sure it's some complicated photography thing that i would understand better... IF ONLY I HAD FINISHED ART SCHOOL! [sob]

i love globes. especially outdated ones like this. every time i pass one i'm tempted to do the old "spin the globe and point your finger and that's where you're going to go next!" thing which in this case took me almost exactly onto the border area between iran, afghanistan, and pakistan, which, you know, thanks and all, but i think i'll pass. i took a breeze through the "PLAN YOUR NEXT VACATION TO BEAUTIFUL SCENIC ZAHEDAN (FORMERLY DOZZ-AAP)" brochure and i think i'll take waikiki instead, if it's all the same. k?

all of this, every last part of it, confuses me. is there a lot of competition to be the "#1 Celebrity DVD News Magazine?" what exactly IS that, even? does the fact that it's "Unauthorized!" really entice anyone to buy it? again, what does that even mean? the only thing i can get behind is that brad pitt is certainly a hunk of something. what that is exactly i think is still open to a fair amount of debate. he kind of looks like a hunk of mushed up modeling clay that someone put in the oven and then took out too soon, before it was done baking, in that main picture on the front.

"Hollywood's Hottest Hunk of Mushed Up Modeling Clay That Someone Put In the Oven and Then Took Out Too Soon, Before It Was Done Baking: Brad Pitt"

now THAT i'd watch, unauthorized or not.

i love these things! the colors! so primary! someone told me these were for hospitals and i guess i can see that, but i was real tempted to grab them and use them for funs instead. they're so modular! plus it encourages you to eat more balanced meals because you have to come up with something to put in the other spots on the tray, once you've slapped your large sizzling piece of meat down in the biggest section. of course you could always just put little green plastic army men in the other spots on the tray, and pretend that the large piece of meat in the other section is a giant invading steak monster from the planet cafeteria, and your little plastic battalion is the only thing standing in between it and civilization.

life's too short not to play with your food people

there were several huge stacks of pristine 45s. almost half of them were this exact record. there had to be 30 or 40 copies. i've never (to my knowledge) heard this song but it must REALLY REALLY SUCK so if anyone tries to play it for you, you have my permission to tell them to go ahead and take a big old flying fuck at themselves

speaking of f-words and such, i managed to find one of the "steamy" passages in what is surely the finest example of erotic fiction ever created - "Lingering Shadows." how shadows exactly manage to linger, i don't think they ever get around to addressing, but there is sure a whole buttload of sexin' going on, including what for my money is maybe the funniest verbal description of foreplay ever written:

"He trembled violently against her, his thumb rubbing fiercely against her nipple..."

is that how grownups do it? they have seizures and try to rip each other's nipples off with their thumbs? i'd hate for some clueless teenager to get his hands on this book and take it as some kind of how to manual on how to perform the sex act. and a note to any impressionable young (or old) women out there, from men the world round: please don't murmur softly against our mouths while we're trying to grope you. we find it distracting, and a little confusing, and it may cause us to tremble violently and potentially injure your nipples with our thumbs. thanks.

a perfectly good martini glass, ruined. decorate your own dishes with ugly glazes and a shitty brush, all in the comfort of your own home! this does not say "cocktail olive on a toothpick" to me nearly as much as it says "oh shit, there's something floating in my drink... oh god, what is that? is that a gangrenous eyeball floating in front of fish poop? no more appletinis for me!" which is probably not the reaction whoever created this piece of thing was going for, if i had to guess.

we are comedic geniUSes, but alas, i noticed upon further inspection that the humor in this picture may be slightly difficult to make out, considering it's a tiny, low resolution image, taken on an extremely poor quality digital camera by a woefully underqualified photographer, in a mirror, no less. thankfully there was another record on hand to rectify that situation. here it is.

boners. you see? you get it? boners! because... yeah. anyway.

i know this is funny for some reason, but i just can't figure out why. aaargh!

i love badminton. that is all.

and last, but not least... what do these two things have in common?

they both gave me an erection.

THANK YOU GOODNIGHT

d

sad news

2009-07-22T18:42:00.004-05:00

it is with a heavy heart that i report to you, dear readers, the passing of one of this town's finest thrifting institutions. the goodwill on chelsea ave is no longer with us, i'm afraid, as i was pained to discover this week when i was out and about. i happened to look on the google maps listing before i left the house, and there in sad gray text under the address and phone number were the words "place closed." before i got out my weeping handkerchief (doesn't everyone have one of those?) i resolved to at least drive by and see for myself, and in fact, yes, the place is closed. the thrift store, the administrative offices, all of it. boarded up with trash covering the parking lot, like something out of a shitty movie. this is a royal bummer, for several reasons:

1. the last thing that neighborhood (or any neighborhood in this city) needs is another boarded up building. i've always been of the mindset that any business (with the exception of the really hideous corporate monstrosities like starbucks, wal-mart, blockbuster, mcdonalds, etc) occupying a given space is better than no business. even if it's another check cashing place or a nail salon or a fucking porno shop, i don't care, which leads me to

2. this is just another blow to the infrastructure of the city, and it's going to make me wince just a little bit more every time i have to drive out to bartlett or southaven just to go to a goodwill. i can imagine that the chelsea ave location wasn't exactly an enormous cash cow for goodwill in general (i know the building was in massive disrepair... hell, i photographed it) but isn't half the point of a charitable organization to help the people who need it the most? trust me, they're doing much better on stage road than they are on chelsea ave. boarding up the store is only going to contribute to the urban blight that is driving people out of the city in the first place. you shouldn't make them have to go all the way to olive branch just to get a cheap pair of pants. and lastly,

3. this was actually kind of my secret favorite store. the very fact that it was in a rough-looking neighborhood (although for all the times i went up there i never once saw anything sketchy going on, and my dopey white ass always cruised in and out completely without incident) kept the tourists away, the fact that the building was pretty fucked up kept the prices low, and i always, always found something i wanted. i never once left that place empty handed, which i don't think i can say about any other store, anywhere.

i suppose the writing was on the wall for a while - they had been having a 50% off the ENTIRE STORE sale for the better part of the last year - but it's still a shame to see the place go. i'm leaving it on my (recently revived) thrift store map (aka "A HUGE EVER GROWING PULSATING BRAIN THAT RULES FROM THE CENTRE OF THE ULTRAWORLD") partly in memoriam, and partly in the vain hopes that maybe someday they'll open it back up, although i'm not holding my breath. maybe they'll even fix the roof.

here are my past visits. rest in peace chelsea dear, you were truly one of a kind.

http://bitterbooks.blogspot.com/2008/03/3182008-goodwill-chelsea-ave.html

http://bitterbooks.blogspot.com/2009/01/psychedelic-serenity-prayer.html

http://bitterbooks.blogspot.com/2008/08/8308-salvo-danny-thomas-goodwill.html

love

d

Goodwill Main St, Southaven

2009-07-17T17:45:00.003-05:00

i went to the goodwill just over the border in southaven earlier this month. it seems like a bit of a trek to go all the way to mississippi just to go to a goodwill when there are like six in memphis proper, but this one's good and if you can get on the highway pretty quickly it actually doesn't take any longer to get here from midtown than it would to stage road. so there. suck it.

that's right, i said suck it.

plus, this place is bonkers, as i detailed in my first post about it earlier this year. these are... angry monkey statues, with little outfits. i would say your guess is as good as mine, but i can't even fathom the slightest fraction of a guess, so if you have one than it is not only AS good but is in fact BETTER than mine. congratulations. here is your cookie.

from the "feel free to kick yourself, NICE and hard" department: about a year ago i spotted, and proceeded to drool all over, a texas instruments TI-99/4A home computer, for all of seven bucks, but after much hand-wringing and general douchebaggery, elected not to buy it, because there "weren't any cartridges. waaaah." as if i was going to stop going to thrift stores or something. goes to show, people. lesson one, apparently i slept through the first day of class at thrift university:

YOU WILL FIND EVERYTHING, EVENTUALLY. i could have had a STACK of cartridges for that bad boy, for, what, i think like a dollar a pop, maybe less. oh well. it's only SORT of the most awesome thing you've ever seen, right? right?

this looks like it would hurt to use. this intense little contraption is something called a "VITAMASTER ROLLER MASSAGER" and apparently it used to be used by people with intense body shame who felt that repeatedly assaulting themselves with large wooden sticks would somehow fill the hole inside of them where their self-esteem would be. why this is not still in common usage is a mystery to me. maybe someone sued. it actually worked, too, surprise of all surprises, but i was too much of a wuss to actually try it out, without some indication of how i was exactly supposed to use it, because as i said earlier, this thing looks like it could seriously mess you up fun time.

i was, on this trip, not just entirely goofing around either, i happened to still need a few basic supplies for my most humble of abodes, one of which happened to be a pot strainer, and i happened to come across this bad little number, which resembles nothing quite so much as a miniature scimitar. so if hordes of marauding barbarians happen to attack while i'm in the middle of making myself some quick pasta, i'll be prepared. nice to know my boy scout training has come in so handy.

snagged these for the missus. who could resist?

SUPER QUIZ II: YOU THOUGHT SUPER QUIZ I WAS A COMPLETE MINDFUCK? GET A LOAD OF THIS SHIT.

that phrase is not actually contained anywhere in the packaging or promotional literature. i think i missed my true calling as a copywriter. i played through a couple rounds with some close friends the other night and can report that while it's a fun, if needlessly complicated little game, there is really no apparent connection, either directly stated or implied, between this game and the popular science fiction author whose name graces the box. if i had to guess i'd say they probably just sent him a letter saying something along the lines of "DEAR MR. ASIMOV CAN WE PUT YOUR NAME ON OUR BOX HERE IS A CHECK FOR SOME MONEY" and, like any good scifi author, he was like "uhhh, yeah! thanks for the money! wicked sweet!"

little known fact: isaac asimov invented the phrase "wicked sweet"

loves me some bittman. new york times columnist, prolific food writer, blogger, and author of probably the only cookbook you might ever need (aside from this one), mark bittman is one of the proud soldiers on the front lines of the war to keep food and cooking fun and accessible to people like me, who might eat boxed macaroni and cheese every day of their lives, if left to their own devices. read him.

and then there's this fucking thing. atomic arcade pinball, from the good people at TOMY. it was like three bucks, i bet it even worked, too. i reflexively snatched it up and put it in my cart, and carried it around for a while before it dawned on me that although $3 is a totally awesome price for something this vintage and sweet, the $13 i'd have to pay for a pack of batteries to get the damn thing to run (SOMETHING'S gotta power that score board, right?) was substantially less awesome. i realized i just liked how cool it looked, so before i put it back i took a few pictures

and basically felt okay about the whole thing. what i did NOT feel okay about, however, was this -

these people scare me. deeply, and profoundly. do you want to know what i think they're up to, right now? i'll tell you, in a sentence or less, for each of them.

rodeo clown (retired).

runs a stevie nicks webring.

STILL trying to get the band back together.

wife of a retired rodeo clown.

sex change.

i wish i knew more people who smoked. in a way, there's never been a better time to be a smoker. aside from the fact that you're becoming more and more of a social pariah with every passing day, and the economical and societal pressures to quit are at an all time peak, you've got to consider how many SWEET ashtrays there are floating around out there, as more and more of your brethren either kick the habit or are forced out of the game by rising overhead, caring family members, or the icy hand of death. i saw this AWESOME ashtray from "St. Bartholomaus" for like $2 but couldn't think of anyone to buy it for. pity.

say what you like about 80's electro-pop-r&b-whatever, but this is a pretty badass little tape. "the men all pause?" come on. some of you seem skeptical. watch this and tell me what you think.

i, uhhh... i don't know. guess it speaks for itself. you either find something like this interesting or you don't. nothing i can say one way or another is going to convince you. take it or leave it, folks.

as we were getting ready to leave, i took a spin by the vhs section, and after brushing off the half-inch of dust that had gathered on all of these poor old neglected tapes, managed to score like over a dozen movies for a buck a piece. i firmly maintain that vhs is the only valid format in which to watch the muppet movie, and if you disagree, then, as i said earlier...

suck it.

love

d

how does one spoon "for" someone, exactly?

2009-04-20T16:28:00.002-05:00

i get the feeling this owl knows. from trusty old thrift town on winchester ave, 4/12.

secondhand hawaiians

2009-04-09T09:13:00.003-05:00

here are some shots from two salvation army stores:

the first, in kailua-kona, on the west coast of the big island of hawaii.

this place was pretty all right. i've had some stupendous experiences thrifting on my previous trips to our 50th state, so i was pretty jazzed to get another crack at it. you might not be surprised to hear this but my wife and i spent a good chunk of our honeymoon in honolulu driving around to thrift stores, and bought so many books and clothes and records and stuff that we had to buy more luggage while we were there just to get them all back. kind of embarrassing in hindsight but at the time it was fun.

look at all these records. .25 a pop. you believe that?

and the books. so many damn books.

i can't think of anywhere else i've been that's had that many board games. obviously buying a lot of this stuff was out of the question, considering you now have to PAY most airlines for the privilege of checking a bag through, and shipping costs are, trust me, not something you want to consider.

i ended up getting a couple andrew hill records, an ellington, and a milt jackson record from 1974 that looks amazing, but i haven't had a chance to listen to yet. all in perfect shape, all .25 a piece. where else can you find stuff like that? nowhere, take it from me.

we also took a beautiful 2 hour drive over to hilo, on the other side of the island, and went to the "Sally Shop" (so cute!) in downtown hilo, which was one of the most beautiful, relaxing places i've ever been. i haven't felt that at home anywhere since the first time we hung out in galveston. downtown, i mean, not the thrift store.

the store was actually kind of dingy.

they had some interesting stuff, though. kind of a loose definition of what constitutes "valuable merchandise," but it's the islands, man, what do you want?

i was, alas, foiled in my quest to find some more athletic shirts to add to my collection. one of my favorite things about our honeymoon was that we decided to bring almost no clothes with us, and just hit up thrift stores after we got there. this was partially to make it a little easier to pack, partially so we'd look a little more like locals (i'm sure we still stuck out like sore thumbs) and mainly just because it was fun. i was hoping to replicate that this trip, but it didn't really work out. oh well, should have gone to more stores i guess

the thing that makes thrifting in hawaii so much fun (aside from the fact that you're in hawaii) is that it's basically a closed system, it's the most isolated place in the country, so just by definition it's not going to be nearly as picked over as any store on the mainland, and there are going to be things here that you just will not find anywhere else. add to that the fact that people are passing through here from almost everywhere on the planet, and they can't afford to gouge you on most stuff the way bigger stores can (because none of the locals would be able to afford to shop there) and you have an experience unlike any other.

some of you are probably wishing you could slap me in the head right now for not spending every waking moment at the beach with a rum drink in my hand, but the hardcore thrift junkies know what's up. trust me when i say that we did our share of laying in the sun and consuming beverages with little umbrellas in them, but come on. going to thrift stores is one of the coolest things about going ANYWHERE and i got to see a part of the big island that i GUARANTEE you is not in any travel books. whale watching, luaus, hiking up a volcano? PASS. point me to the nearest salvo and i'll meet you for caipirinhas by the pool later on.

aloha

d

andy wise, park ave thrift, MIFA

2009-03-04T02:20:00.004-06:00

here's andy wise's "stand your ground" report that aired recently on action news 5. this report details investigators apparently finding prescription drugs in a suitcase in the children's aisle at the park avenue thrift store. it also features, i suppose as a point of comparison, the MIFA store and its manager, Scotta Allen. watch it, please, it's short.

i have mixed feelings about this. i've been to the park ave thrift store many, many times since i came to memphis, i've met the manager, talked with him (at length) and i can say from personal experience that although their store is large and chaotic, there's nowhere near the atmosphere of neglect and disregard for basic personal safety that seems to exist in this video. the fact remains (if you believe one reporter's account, which i have no reason to DISbelieve necessarily, i'm just saying) that it was a genuinely dangerous fuckup on the part of the staff and supervisors, and it could have ended much worse than it did, but if you'd care to dig a little deeper with me for a moment...

it's to be expected. i don't like to endorse the perspective that secondhand stores are somehow inherently dangerous or unfriendly places, but what you're dealing with is a massive, overwhelming, endless stream of inscrutable junk flowing in from lord only knows where to a staff of (GENERALLY) underpaid, undertrained, undermotivated "sorters" who have the less than enviable job of trying to sift out the obviously useless, poisonous, unsaleable or otherwise broken merchandise from the material that ends up on the sales floor for you to buy for 1.99. i hear these people working, all day long, on the other side of paper thin walls, and trust me, it's not a job you want. the fact of the matter is they do a better job than you'd believe (my own consumer-end gripes notwithstanding) of pulling out the stuff that's genuinely dangerous or otherwise unsuitable for mass consumption. could be park ave, could have been any goodwill in town, could be... fuck, could be ANY thrift store in memphis or anywhere else that i've ever been. you're going to find toys that have been ruled "unsafe" by any number of regulatory commissions. you're going to find products that have probably been recalled at one point or another. hell, you're going to find clothes that have no business residing on the body of man or beast, at any point in history.

IT'S A THRIFT STORE!

it's to be expected.

that being said, i can't fault someone like Scotta Allen for trying (and as far as i can tell so far, succeeding) to take it to the next level at a place like the MIFA store. i don't want to hide any cards here, she's been a longtime reader of this internet blogging space, but i genuinely think she's probably doing some good things down at the store, so i don't have any reservations about saying so. they started a blog. there's an email list. and although they've CUT THEIR SATURDAY HOURS BOO!!!! i still think they're trying to do something good there, and not at the expense of any of the other stores in town. they've been cutting out kids' toys, stuffed animals, anything unregulated or unsafe or otherwise unpresentable for months, they probably take more care in sorting out incoming material than any other thrift store in town (maybe) but the fact remains...

they're the exception to the rule. is that a shot against them? of course not. is it a shot against the park ave store? no way. is it a shot against andy wise or his investigators? no. a worse cynic than i would:
doubt the veracity of this reporter's findings
suggest how easy it is to get into any thrift store on planet earth and plant evidence
point out the fact that every single salvation army i've ever been into has had at least one outdated piece of "child's safety equipment"
perhaps for a moment put the responsibility on the parents to verify the functionality of something they're entrusting their children's lives to

but the fact of the matter is i spend a lot more time in thrift stores than anyone probably should, and i can see this happening the way it's played out in the news report. i don't think it was manipulative or unseemly of scotta allen to point out that her store takes extra precautions about the material they put out, i don't think it was wrong of the manager of the park ave store to be shocked and unhappy about the issue, and i don't think it was wrong of andy wise to pursue the story (assuming it just neatly fell in his lap, like it seemed to). i'd just like to remind people that it's probably deserving of a little deeper thought than a very brief news article provides, and remind you that as always, you cannot have your cake and eat it too, and that in a place where you can dress yourself, furnish your apartment, and entertain your kids for less than it costs the average american to watch basic cable for a year, a LITTLE extra work on your part as a consumer MIGHT occasionally be required.

does that mean that you should expect to find poisonous pills in every suitcase? fucking of course not, but it's not (ever) going to be the safe, sanitized, child-friendly utopia that perhaps this new class of economically challenged americans (as in all of us) would like to believe it is. it's thrifting, folks. your hands will get dirty. they should, anyway. just be smart and everything will be fine.

until next time

your pal

d

Amvets 02/15

2009-02-22T15:47:00.003-06:00

stopped by the good old amvets on presley blvd last week. nothing earth shattering, but i had the camera so i thought i'd shoot some.

i guess these are supposed to be speed dial suggestions for an old phone? what do you do if you don't know, for example, the cast of "Silk Stalkings" (numbers one and two) or the old couple from a metamucil commercial (number five) or michelle obama (number six) or the kid from the sandlot (number eight) or a cartoon policeman (number seven)? what then? THIS PHONE IS FUCKING USELESS is what.

and distracting too - you basically have to poke like nine people in the face just to make a call.

the ubiquitous cool looking but generally pain in the ass cameras

and this thing, which neither my friend alpha nor my wife nor i could identify with any certainty. clearly it's something for sewing, or cutting or stitching or ripping or maiming or something but we couldn't get it to do anything aside from sit there and confound us. one has to wonder at the $15 price tag. does the staff of the amvets know something we don't? i bet they do. i bet they know a LOT of things we don't.

RAIDERS

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
—Horace Smith

thank you goodnight

d

goodwill southaven

2009-02-06T10:06:00.002-06:00

okay, last and definitely not least on my voyage into destiny was this goodwill store on main street in southaven. by the time i rolled up here i was demoralized, dejected, exhausted, and generally just regretting the entire idea of going to mississippi to go to thrift stores in the first place. would this be the final blow?

hell no! this place actually rocked! it's really similar in size and scope and content to the goodwills we went to in jackson, lo those many months ago. it was love at first sight, even though my first sight was this:

it's okay, this was my second sight

that's right, it is literally the only action figure likeness of alfred molina you are ever, ever going to see, anywhere. guaranteed to produce a chuckle.

this place had tons of crap, and singlehandedly made up for the poor offerings from earlier in the day. decent prices, too - this table was only 20 bucks if i remember correctly

and this one was only 15. nice to see a thrift store that doesn't price shit like it's fucking stickley or something just because it has all 4 legs still attached.

this made me extremely uncomfortable. if you need an explanation as to why then don't worry about it, you're better off not knowing.

ahh, good old fashioned useless shit, so nice to see you again. this plastic device not only scoops coffee with one side, but it has a handy filter separator on the other! accomplishing what those boring, old fashioned "spoons" and "fingers" never could. thank god! i cannot imagine how this has remained unopened for so long.

if you look up "ridiculous shit that people find in thrift stores" in the dictionary there is a picture of this thing

REALLY nice pair of combat boots, a little too small for yours truly, but only like 10 bucks i think versus the what, 30, 40, maybe more you'd pay at any other place that cared to sell them? someone scored big time with these, i am sure of it

and of course pick-a-nick baskets. calloo callay!

it was pretty amusing to me that the last store i decided to stop at on this trip is probably the only one i'd considering going back to any time soon, and is also the most conveniently reached (right off the side of I-55) from memphis. lots of cool stuff, pretty good prices, and hell, after the other places i'd been through that day, how could it not be impressive? definitely recommended.

Goodwill
925 Main St
Southaven, MS 38671
(662) 342-7097

d

bibles for missions, house of grace

2009-02-06T09:46:00.002-06:00

let's press on through the rest of this trek south of the border, shall we?

after the goodwill book store i popped down the street to the bibles for missions store on goodman rd, and there is only one word to describe this place.

COUUUUUNNNNTTTTRRRRYYYYY!!!!! shew! with a capital "whut?" it takes a lot to make the goodwill on chelsea avenue seem hip and urbane, but by good god damn they pulled it off without a hitch here, buddy! from the folding table full of free bible tracts next to the front door to the GIANT pile of gospel albums (10 for a buck if i remember correctly) to the... well, let's go the tape, shall we?

you can sort of judge the mental life of a thrift store by how the books look. this just made my head spin, especially after having just been in the goodwill book store down the street. now, i know, look i understand, this section assuredly doesn't have the highest turnover rate of anywhere in the entire store (the only halfway amusing thing i found was an autobiography of leslie nielsen with a bunch of fake pictures) but is it too much to ask maybe someone to come by every few weeks or so and at least make a couple piles of all the loose discarded neglected shit just lying around all over the place? i almost started doing it but i had a sort of "take only pictures, leave only footprints" moment and decided not to.

it looks like someone dropped a bomb on home depot and swept up the wreckage on some shitty metal shelves

what the fuck is this shit? seriously, what the fuck is the fucking point? can someone enlighten me? this stuff makes me think of 2 inch deep shag carpeting with 25 years of cat hair buried in it, one of those fake wood hunting picture clock things, and instant biscuits out of the fucking toaster oven. JESUS! this might as well be a commemorative dale earnhardt beer coozie. that's basically what i'm seeing when i look at this picture. a fur-covered toilet seat with something "cute" embroidered on it.

NO MATTER WHERE I SERVE MY GUESTS IT SEEMS THEY LIKE MY KITCHEN BEST

you know what was happening, when there was only one set of footprints? do you?

i won't spoil it.

bless this mess

this was the most interesting thing i saw the entire time.

moving on

next up was the "house of grace" thift store on main st, or "down on maiiinnn streeeetttttt..." as bob seeger would say. pretty apropos in this instance. i think this picture says enough about this place.

be back next time with a store i didn't loathe

Bibles For Missions
3828 Goodman Rd W
Horn Lake, MS 38637
(662) 280-6792

House of Grace
1652 Stateline Rd W (Main St)
Southaven, MS 38671
(662) 253-0041

d

goodwill book store

2009-02-06T08:36:00.003-06:00

continuing my voyages into the uncharted wilderness here, with the goodwill bookstore, down on goodman rd. in beautiful southaven, ms.

i drove right by this place at first, for two reasons. one, my directions kind of sucked. i wrote them though, so no excuse there. two, and i don't know if the picture does it justice or not, but this place is kind of small. and by "kind of" i mean "really really," especially considering that the entire rear half of it functions as a donation center.

this is about the entire size of it. i'd been hearing about this famed "thrift store full of nothing but books!" for quite a while from a few different people and places, so i guess i couldn't help but be a little underwhelmed by the actual sight of it, but that's okay. it's a nice idea, and it's a nice little store, even if i only came away with three books.

i guess maybe if i had any real beef with this place it would be that it's sort of lowering the general level of what you're going to find in most of the regular other goodwills in this area, book-wise, that is, by culling out all the stuff that the general employee populace seems to regard as "good" (frightening thought, that) and shipping it off to one store in the middle of nowhere in southaven that's the size of my storage unit. that being said, there were more than a few people browsing around when i was there, so maybe it's attracting a different class of customer, people who wouldn't "thrift" per se but have no objections to picking up a couple books on the cheap. if that's the case, then keep it up, one supposes, but i still found myself wishing this stuff had been spread around through the three other goodwill stores i went to that day. anyway here's what i got:

sarah waters, author of a book my wife read a while ago and liked pretty well called the fingersmith. this is her next one after that, and while i'm not usually much of a fan of this kind of stuff these look pretty well written.

how could i say no to this? it's pretty good, if sort of straight forward postapocalyptic zombie fare, originally serialized (and still available for free, along with its two sequels) here i guess someone decided to publish a bound version, and bully for them. give it a read sometime if you're hankering for a dose of the living dead. or, just go to wal-mart BAZING HOT-CHA-CHA-CHA-CHA!!!!!!

i discovered p. g. wodehouse's jeeves and wooster through watching, of all things, the tv show house, md. turns out that guy is actually british can you believe it?!??!?!?!? I KNOW!!!!!!! anyway not only is hugh laurie a simpering limey but he apparently had a long and prosperous career before he settled into his greatest role as a condescending handicapped drug addict who occasionally practices medicine, much of which consisted of working with one of my other favorite british people (it's not a long list), stephen fry. they had a pretty successful sketch comedy show for a few years but i think their best stuff is the adaptations of p. g. wodehouse's jeeves and wooster stories, all of which are available from the usual dvd sources. i won't say wodehouse is the most accessible author in human history - to be fair, he is writing from, about, and of a completely different culture and era - but watching the dvds was sort of a good primer, and i find the jeeves and wooster stuff pretty amusing now. anyway.

all in all a pretty neat little store, my previous gripes notwithstanding. the prices are along the same lines as the regular goodwill prices (1, 2, 3 bucks and then up for anything bigger like photo books, etc) which aren't great but they're not horrible either, and there's probably one or two things in there for anyone, so the next time you're in southaven and you find yourself thinking "i could go for a good book right now" well first things first congratulations because you just became the mayor! also go ahead and stop into to the goodwill book store, you can probably find something.

Goodwill Book Store
1514 Goodman Rd E
Southaven, MS 38671
(662) 536-8157

love

d

new store(s)!

2009-01-27T23:40:00.003-06:00

your humble narrator voyaged out into the hinterlands last week to explore some of the further reaches of the greater memphis area thrifting experience, and was pleasantly surprised by what he found. photographs to follow.

the goodwill on e shelby drive, way out. see it on the google map of pain, to the right side of the page? it's that flickering light far off in the distance. by the time the light from that goodwill gets to us our children's children's children will be long dead. think about that for a while.

this was a pretty nice store, although they were embarking on a massive storewide repainting project that apparently necesitated covering up a lot of the merch with drop cloths

and dampened the cluttered, haphazard, find stuff lying around all over the place type of spirit that makes one want to dig around in a thrift store for several hours on end.

don't get me wrong, they still had some neat stuff, but it was a little... sparse.

i'm not sure i like, appreciate, or endorse this sentiment, but it made me laugh. and cringe. and fart. okay that was probably the burrito

OH MY GOD FART JOKES I'VE HIT A NEW LOW PEOPLE

i managed to snag this sweet bug eyed kid painting on black velvet for our good friend of the blog holly who asked me to keep my eyes peeled for them. so nice to able to spread the love like that occasionally.

and of course i got books. how could i say no to this one?

you should have seen the look the lady at the counter gave me when she saw this. i wanted to walk around the counter and give her a hug and say "don't worry lurleen, the scary picture of the gay man taking his shirt off is going away, it can't hurt you any more, i'll take it home and put it inside a locked vault where it will never meet human eyes again, i promise" and then buy her a pancake or something

snagged this book about historical hebrew pimp Benjamin Disraeli, part of the Time Reading Program thing that i'm pseudoobsessed with. they apparently published a mountain of this stuff so there's no hope of me ever tracking it all down, and it's more or less worthless as collectibles, i just love the aesthetic of these books so much that i can hardly ever put them down once i pick them up

did you know this was a serious problem? apparently it is. they have specials about it on the learning channel and everything. clutter. what a quintessentially american issue.

i'm a sucker for these "and philosophy" books - i'll page through the simpsons and philosophy, the matrix and philosophy, family matters and philosophy (apparently the character of "urkel" was nothing but an exercise in satire against post-hegelian constructivism) - whatever ya got. and being a total james bond fan this was a no-brainer.

anyway that's about it. there were probably more great finds there if i had tarried longer but the paint fumes were getting intense and i had a long day ahead of me, but this goodwill ranks right up there with most of the others in town and i'd definitely recommend a visit, for a change of pace if nothing else. the fact that it's out in the boonies sort of works to its detriment but the next time you find yourself cruising the farther expanses of east shelby drive why not pop in? tell 'em large marge sent ya.

until next time

your pal

d

Goodwill
7040 E Shelby Dr
Memphis, TN 38125
(901) 754-8500

Community Dolla Warehouse

2009-01-07T20:50:00.003-06:00

my good friends will and ashley and i went to a new thrift store last month called the community dolla warehouse, on east georgia street, in between south main and 2nd street, in what used to apparently a concrete warehouse that the owner decided to convert into a thrift store. how was it, you ask?

pretty freaking cool! from what i was led to understand the guy who runs the place decided not to pursue a career in the concrete industry any more so he converted his huge warehouse space into a thrift store, replete with the usual:

cds, vhs tapes, totally reasonably priced

books that while not outstanding in their selection, were very cheap

tons of kids toys and games and assorted crap like that (this was about a third of it)

the requisite selection of tvs and old couches, all in pretty good shape

a smattering of truly quirky pieces of decor (never seen a monogrammed lamp before)

a small but decent looking selection of clothes

jars, cooking implements - the kind of kitchen stuff you'd expect

a few "mystery items" that neither my companions nor i could even postulate any viable theories about

a whole mess of dishes and glasses, including a few hilarious shot glasses, which i purchased

the space hat from my earlier post

and this AMAZING little chair desk side table thing, which is left handed, if you notice, which one so rarely sees, anywhere.

all in all a really cool little store... i just totally applaud the idea that some guy decided to just up and put a bunch of junk in a big warehouse and call it a thrift store. my friends and i found out about this place from a random cardboard sign that i'd assume the owner put up at the corner of cooper and union a couple months ago, and i have to say the trip was totally worth it even though i didn't buy a mountain of stuff, and i would heartily encourage anyone who reads this and is intrigued by what they see to pop down and check it out - the actual address is something like 148 east georgia or thereabouts, basically if you take main street south from downtown and make a left on georgia you can't miss it, it's right on the right in a building that looks like an old concrete warehouse, because that's what it was. don't bother telling him i sent you... that has never once in my life done anything beneficial for anyone. usually the opposite

anyway get down there as soon as you can, the hours are pretty usual - i want to say maybe 9-5 weekdays, 1-5 weekends or something like that. i don't know. wow, remember when i used to give a crap about reporting actual information instead of just ranting about random photographs? ah, those were better times. oh well...to recap:

Community Dolla Warehouse
Somewhere on East Georgia in between South Main and 2nd Street
Something like 9-5 M-F and maybe 1-5 S/S(?)
I don't know what the phone number is

that is all

d

the book, the monkey, and the golf clubs

2009-01-05T13:15:00.005-06:00

that sounds like a children's classic just waiting to be written. anyway here are some things i've seen lately.

don't ask. really, you don't want to know. i'm not kidding.

i didn't run across enough interesting books this week for a sunday literary suppository, but i had so much fun writing the last one i'll definitely be keeping my eyes peeled...i may be scaring up a LOT of books in the not too distant future, so we might be dealing with a rather large suppository in a little while here, but you know the drill, dear readers, just close your eyes and think of england

i can't put my finger on what it is i found so disturbing about this. it was a little rubber monkey in a wooden box with a sheet of plastic across the front of it, that kind of bounced and wiggled around when you moved the box - i suspect someone just put it in there of their own volition, as i couldn't fathom any reason for it to be manufactured that way, but... nonetheless. maybe it's the color scheme, sort of "twin peaks" or something, but whatever it is, it freaked me right the fuck out. damn monkeys

and this week i finally put my golf clubs where my mouth is and decided to pick up a few from thrift town, considering they were two bucks a piece, and the bag was only five. so for (or should i say fore?) the total investment of like fifteen bucks i'm now a golfer! now i just have to figure out how to golf. oh well, whenever the weather warms up anyone's welcome to join me at overton park and see how long it takes us to get thrown off the course. i've been talking about doing this for such a long time that it was kind of surreal to actually bring all the shit up front to buy it, but it felt pretty cool at the same time. there is a smell, i should mention that, emanating from the bag, kind of an "old man's garage" smell crossed with the usual thrift store melange that everything usually has, but what the hell, we'll be outside (and inebriated), i don't think it'll be that bad. i wonder how fast those golf carts go? i bet they go pretty fast.

until next time

love

d

Compromised Summer's Eve

2009-01-05T12:40:00.003-06:00

i received the nicest email last week from a reader who haunts thrift stores and takes pictures herself, and i invited her (as i'd like to invite you all) to send in anything that jumps out at her, and this is what i got.

dear god. it shouldn't take any long time readers of the blog very long to surmise that this came from Nancy's Thrift Store on wells station road, the ninth circle of thrifting hell in memphis tennessee. beyond that i'm just not even sure what to say. there's some sort of story to be told here, but much like that time i found the beat up 3-pack of trojan magnums chewed up on the sidewalk that afternoon, i'm just not i want to know what it is.

i believe this astute reader said it best...her only comment upon sending the picture along was "WHY?" which i think sums it all up pretty nicely.

thanks ever so much to holly for the nice letter and the contribution, i would encourage anyone and everyone in the greater memphis area to send in pics as they pop up, since, sadly, i can't be everywhere at once. if only i could...imagine the possibilities.

see you all again soon

love

d

TEETH!

2009-01-04T10:11:00.000-06:00

aaagh!

psychedelic serenity prayer

2009-01-04T09:52:00.002-06:00

god grant me the serenity to...whoa, look at my hands. wow. have you ever really looked at your hands before? wow, man.

goodwill, chelsea ave. 2 bucks, which totals up to one buck, since they're still doing their apparently endless "50% off EVERYTHING" sale. they're a little light in some departments (furniture) and it's totally in the hood but for as long as they're doing this sale they're kind of the place to be.

awwww....

2008-12-19T22:03:00.002-06:00

it's cheap, i know, but...

awwwwwwwwwww...

animal friends. i love this painting and if my walls weren't already in danger of giving out from the sheer volume of stuff i've got hung up on them i would have snagged it. everything about this is cool and if you don't like it then you don't have a heart.

four bucks.

come on...

2008-12-18T03:59:00.002-06:00

seriously?

they just don't make jokes this obvious any more. it doesn't happen.

this has got to be some kind of prank.

no? really?

really?

jesus

what is it? (1)

2008-12-17T10:36:00.002-06:00

cable box? no. electric compass? no, that makes no sense. intercontinental ballistic missile aimer? maybe, but i doubt it.

never mind, youtube has the answer!

awesome

comic nerds ahoy

2008-12-16T08:58:00.003-06:00

just thought you'd like to know that the MIFA store (corner of vance and east downtown, check the map) has a couple of shelves worth of well preserved small press comics from the eighties - stuff like "JUSTICE MACHINE" here which while perhaps not the medium's finest achievement, is still pretty interesting (and basically like crack if you're a total comics nerd like me). i didn't notice until i was walking out the door but they're half off too, or they were that day at least so if you've got a buck fifty to spare then

THUNDER BUNNY CAN BE YOURS

there's some dumb stuff like hot rod magazines mixed in and whatnot but if you feel like sifting through that nonsense you could snag a whole lot of comics that are (trust me) IMPOSSIBLE to find in this shape at this price anywhere else...for financial and storage reasons i had to pass but i really hope they find a good home.

also of note currently at MIFA: 15 pack cases of Propel™ Invigorating Water (Citrus Flavor) for 2.50 and little boxes of white taper candles for a buck a pop and who doesn't need some of those?

luv ya kids be back soon

d

fondue, anyone?

2008-12-14T18:22:00.003-06:00

new, unused, completely intact fondue set at the goodwill on highland st. 7 bucks. you can bet i bought it. our next pot lach is leaning towards hors d'ouvuereues or however you spell it so perhaps we'll bring a little fondue for everyone to snack on. who knows?

BONUS PIC: THE BUTTMASTER

i almost bought this, just because i mean how often do you ever see something at a thrift store with your name on it, you know what i mean?

space cadets

2008-12-12T22:18:00.003-06:00

this is the space hat.

these are my friends, will and ashley.

i leave it up to you to decide which one of them looks more adorable.

this is the community dolla warehouse on the corner of south main and east georgia, a brand new thrift store that i'll be doing a proper write up on in the very near future.

look forward to it.

love

d

umpty millionth nautical clock picture

2008-12-09T13:02:00.004-06:00

i've heard of people collecting black velvet paintings - in fact once you start looking around there's a frightening amount of stuff out there about it:

WFMU Hallway Gallery Flickr
Indignico Inc
The Velveteria
Paintings of Snoopy on Black Velvet

jesus. anyway, point is there doesn't seem to be the same wealth of resources pertaining to something that's equally as ubiquitous (and for my money, every bit as funny): nautical painting clocks. oh, sure, you can buy a few here and there on ebay but come on! where's their web site? where's their museum? maybe it's because no one's really agreed on nomenclature just yet. nautical picture clock? boat painting with clock? nautical picture clock painting picture? i myself do not know, i just know someone needs to get on the ball about this stuff. dammit

d

lesotho coffee cup

2008-12-04T18:50:00.004-06:00

taken at thrift town on winchester ave, my personal favorite thrift store in town. never slouches when it comes to coffee cups and silly kitchen equipment (this is the place that gave us the ROTATO! after all) they once again failed to disappoint with this BAD ASS piece of african folk sentiment. i guess when you live in lesotho you had better be pretty damn quick on the uptake or you are going to get left in the copious quantities of dust they have just lying around all over the place over there.

i've never met anyone from lesotho (lesothans? lesothians? lesothoites? a whale's vagina?) but i guess they must be pretty sharp to have survived for so long while being completely surrounded by south africa. anyone who's played risk for thirty seconds can tell you that's a pretty untenable position to be in, but i guess that's why you learn the damn game before the players have dispersed, huh? that particular proverb is gonna be kind of a bitch to try and work into casual conversation but i'll do my best, dear readers, rest assured.

catch you next time

d

11/26/2008 - DAV Mendenhall

2008-11-26T21:10:00.005-06:00

DAV Mendenhall. November 13, 2008. my traveling companion will and i pause with trepidation before entering this most hallowed of thrifting holes. i think even at this early point we could tell we were in for a...

MIND BENDER!!!!!!!

okay, so it wasn't that intense of an experience, i just thought that record cover was funny and i couldn't think of anything else to say to start this week's entry off. my friend will and i went to the dav on mendenhall and thrift town on winchester this outing, and i'll be breaking it up into two chunks for easier digestion:

bitter/books - may cause cramps, bloating, or gas. use only as directed.

it was a pretty usual visit to the good old disabled american veterans store, replete with hilarious records, like this "musical salute to the statue of liberty" (do you really think she cares? i don't) aaaaaand

who could forget liberace? unfortunately, not me. you know for all the chuckles i've gotten out of liberace over the years (many, to be sure) i never really stopped to wonder what kind of music he actually played. turns out his repertoire included the themes from the movies "on golden pond," "dragon-slayer(?)" and "raiders of the lost ark," along with apparently the usual smattering of showtunes. sounds like a hoot.

also typical for the dav - extremely interesting, extremely overpriced books. this awesome looking coffee table book on rembrandt was like ten bucks or something, and of course i was there the day before their "first and third thursday" storewide half off sale, so there was no way i was buying it, even though i couldn't come back the next day. i really have to remember to only go on thursdays from now on. i bet it's mobbed, but it's still worth it.

two volume encyclopedia - in case you're curious:

"zy⋅mur⋅gy –noun
the branch of applied chemistry dealing with fermentation, as in winemaking, brewing, the preparation of yeast, etc."

i had no idea.

longtime readers of the blog (if there are any) might remember an early idea i had for an "other people's vacations" party where everyone sits up and looks at secondhand slides of other people's trips around the world, seeing as they're pretty widely available at thrift stores if you look hard enough, but i had no clue as to whether or not it were really possible, taking into account all the different sizes of slides, slide carousels, slide projectors, etc etc etc this is really boring. anyway turns out it's not so simple, that each brand of projector usually only has a handful of compatible carousels, which usually only have a few types of compatible slides, and on and on. not saying it's impossible (and i still think the idea of sitting up drinking looking through other people's old vacation photos is insanely hilarious) just that it might take some work. anyone still interested? anyone still reading, for that matter?

weird little collection of mostly broken baseball bats, all overpriced. i think there must be one person who works at this place one day a week who just has wildly unrealistic ideas about how much people should be paying for a mostly unraveled half-size aluminum baseball bat, and just goes around pricing as much stuff as they can in an eight hour shift, leaving a trail of crap in their wake. i have really been excited about the idea of getting a baseball bat to just keep around the house lately though i cannot explain why.

ditto for the golf clubs, although not for keeping around the house. sadly overpriced too - that metal driver on the left side of the frame? 19.98. not kidding. i really do like this store a whole lot but i cannot for the life of me fathom who they think is going to pay 20 bucks for a used golf club. i realize they're a whole hell of a lot more expensive than that if you buy them new but come on. anyone who is even marginally interested in golf AND shopping at thrift stores is going to know they can get a much better deal than that at a lot of other places. i did however pitch will my idea about snagging a few cheap clubs and a bag and heading out to overton park when the weather gets nice again and having a drunken freeform golf afternoon and he didn't seem completely uninterested which was encouraging. if it ever comes together i will be sure to document it on my other blog, as hilarity will almost certainly ensue.

they did have some more badass, reasonably priced board games though - definitely a strength of this store. this one, "TOUCH," claims to be the "game of palmistry" although from what i could tell it just had some charts and lists and stuff and you read each other's palms, noncompetitively. i didn't really dig too deeply into it, although the cards are huge and cool looking

neat, huh

they had, no shit, upwards of TEN dokken tapes (we counted) including this cassingle of the theme from the third nightmare on elm street (i was not aware that dokken had performed that). i just imagine some ungracefully aging hesher dude tearfully donating his whole collection of dokken tapes after being browbeaten by his mom to move out of her trailer for the umpteenth time...what a moment. also saw this sweet pigface tape with david yow on it that i really wish i had bought for my wife (she loves that shit)

this has to be a joke, right? wow it's not a joke. wow.

i kind of wish i had bought this damn thing now

usual hilarious assortment of carafes, thermoses and other liquid storage items, all pretty cheap. i think if i were ever going to turn into a crazy collector person i would probably buy this type of stuff. i do not know why

kind of a nice looking rug - this is the type of thing people never think to look for at thrift stores, myself included, but we should, we all should, fools that we are.

REALLY nice looking guy's dress shirt that actually gave me pause. i tried it on, it fit really well, it was two freaking bucks, and i thought for a moment to myself i thought "hmmm...." but then i put it back on the shelf, cursed my completely monochromatic fashion sense and moved on. if it's not black or white or grey, don't even waste your time looking at it, i told myself. damn

SPEAKING of golf, there were like half a dozen pretty much immaculate pairs of golf cleats here, which made me laugh and actually consider buying a pair until i stopped and looked at the price tag. guess how much. no, really, guess.

was that ten i hear? nope, more than that.

twenty? nope.

surely they can't be more than thirty, you say? wrong again

forty? higher.

fourty four bucks, is how much they were, a pair. that is just insane. i understand, again, they're a lot more expensive new and it's really specialized footwear for a sport that people with money usually favor but that's the whole idea. your average rich golf asshole isn't going to be trolling the disabled american veterans thrift store on a wednesday afternoon, looking for bargains. i could go on, at length, about how ridiculous this is, but i get the sense i might care a whole hell of a lot more about it then most of you do, so i'll just say it's silly and leave it at that.

SPEAKING of specialized footwear, anyone have any idea what these are? will figured it out pretty quickly, which i was muchly impressed by - i knew right away but that's because i'm a thrift store jedi (he said, arrogantly). anyway they're for like tai kwan do and kickboxing and stuff - if you look at the picture you can see there's no bottoms to them, they're just pads that fit over the tops of your feet and the backs of your ankles with elastic straps to keep them in place, for kicking people repeatedly in the leg and shin and ass without chewing your feet up too much. basically like boxing gloves for your lower extremities. pretty neat, huh? talk about stuff you never expect to see. i couldn't for the life of me think of a use for them. now if there had been two pairs maybe we could have bought them and sparred in the parking lot or something, but sadly no. anyway pretty hilarious.

and that's a wrap for part one of our outing. i'll get part two up as soon as i can although i might as well take this occasion to formally announce that i'm dropping the "updated weekly" part of the mission statement of this blog, effective immediately. i obviously don't have the time or energy any more to stay on the weekly schedule, and that shows no signs of abating any time in the near future, so it's just causing me needless anxiety trying to meet a "deadline" that i invented in the first place and that i suspect none of you really give quite so much of a shit about, anyway. so we're going with "updated when time and inebriation permits" until further notice - all the more reason to get all web 2.0 with it and follow this humble operation via RSS, google reader, or your blog reading apparatus of choice. i'll still be thrifting and taking pictures just as fast as my little legs (and shutter finger) can carry me, and writing about it as much as possible, it's just clearly not going to be every week.

anyway on that note i'll bid you all a fondue and wish you a happy turkey day unless you are a turkey in which case RUN FOR YOUR FUCKING LIFE MAN!

talk to you later

d

11/11/2008 - Amvets Elvis Presley Blvd

2008-11-11T21:16:00.003-06:00

hi all - welcome back to bitter/books, trying to catch up on the backlog of accumulated photographs and weird thoughts i've been sitting on for the past month or so while every friend and relative i've ever wanted to see comes to town to visit. it's been fun, y'all, make no mistake, but lord are we ever tired. but, as they say, the thrift must go on.

in this week's inevitable caravan towards madness we went back to the amvets on elvis presley boulevard. it was beautiful. i can see why it's my wife's favorite thrift store in town. it swept us all off our feet, which is unfortunate because this week we brought a guy in a wheelchair, who made us all feel bad, seeing as he was already swept off his.

just kidding. i would never hang around with someone in a wheelchair. what a downer!

just kidding again

as the sign says, the amvets welcomes all, just as i welcome all to this blog, regardless of age, race, creed, nationality, disability, permeability, sustainability, transubstantiation, transmogrification, trans-canada highway...you name it, you're all welcome. as long as you're not this guy

they always have a lot of neat kids books here, including (nearly every time i've visited) one or two selections by this gentleman, either under the pen name "theo lesieg" or as you may know him, one Dr. Seuss. yes that's right folks and kids, for some reason Dr. Seuss (born Theodore Geisel) felt compelled to publish under a pseudonym for a while, apparently before he had the cojones to come out as a full fledged lunatic and publish books like "On Beyond Z" and his earlier offerings are everywhere, usually illustrated by Bennet Cerf or other capable but unremarkable guys like the Roy McKie that did this one, you know what, they're still worth picking up, because a rose is a rose and dr. seuss will always be dr. seuss.

oh dear. at the time i thought this was hilarious but now i really really wish i hadn't taken these pictures. ladies and gentlemen on behalf of the whole bitter/books organization i must sincerely apologize for the images you are about to witness. the fact of the matter is that simple curiosity pulled me into a situation that i could not truly understand until it was far far too late. i have been to a place that i can never fully return from and, now, dear friends, i am going to take you there with me. this, in two short snapshots, is "I'm Made of Mama's Milk," by one Mary Olsen.

ugh. not so bad though right

UGH AAAGH AAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHH UUUUUGGGGHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAok i guess you get the point

her website is long gone but this page remains. every once in a while i like to go look at it, just to remind myself that i'm not alone. feel free to do the same. who knows, maybe we can take the damn thing over and turn it into a support group

i wish that champagne made my nights this awesome. usually it just makes me burp

old gregg?

this place really is amazing. great full sets of furniture, as per usual. cheap, too...and enigmatic! check this out

perhaps someplace to hang your jacket on WHO KNOWS ONLY TIME WILL TELL

aspiring serial killers...need someplace to buy your body-disposing-of tools without attracting a bunch of needless attention? amvets on presley has just the thing for you - CHEAP BONE SAWS

aspiring money launderers...need a way to count your ill gotten gains without attracting a bunch of inattention from the useless dumbfucks that work at officemax when all you needed were some god damned index cards how fucking hard could that possibly be to just keep out on a shelf where someone can see them i mean for christ's sake does no one even USE the damn things any more?

jesus what was i saying oh yeah amvets on presley has just the thing for you - CHEAP MONEY COUNTERS

at the risk of using the capital letter gag a little too much i gotta play another round of

WOULD

YOU

BUYIT!!!!!?!???!?!?!?!???!?!?!?!??!?!?

with y'all. here's the second ancient macintosh i've seen in as many visits to thrift stores, and just butt-ass-cheap like the other one. same problems as before, but god when you see two of these things in a row like this you just have to believe (if you're a superstitious cave person who is afraid of mobile telephones, like me) that it has to mean something, somehow

once again i did not buy it

i think this thing would pay for itself real damn quick if you went out on like second and peabody and just stood around for long enough. of course you would need a very very long extension cord, depending on where you lived. maybe i could buy it and put it in the bathroom of the p & h. oh god wait no...i think it would get used for all the wrong things.

or all the right things?

substitute this device for the previous one in all the jokes i just made and i think they get EVEN FUNNIER

also it looks like a transformer

one advantage that the amvets on presley has over almost any other store in town is that it's unbelievably huge, fairly well kept, and in such a nasty weird mixed up part of town that lord only knows what will come through on any given day. case in point. these banks of filing cabinets assuredly came from some industrial business or commercial office that operates nearby, and the store is so huge and funky that of course they won't turn them away, and it's so far out of the way and scary that your usual thrift store vultures (read: professional junk dealers and trust fund hipsters with too much money to spend) won't touch it, so here you are, average people who just want 14 stacks of file cabinets (or just want to photograph them, in my case)...as you like it.

what the hell was this for? sewing? something like that? god i gotta stop waiting so long between taking these photographs and writing about them. jesus i thought this thing was cool but now i cannot remember why. is it a picnic basket? 8 tracks? what the hell is it for? sewing. i think it's sewing. is it sewing?

i found these in it. someone call valerie weed and ask her what this thing is for. i would do it but i'm scared

if you want to look like a badass bowler but you don't actually bowl all that well, AND you love coffee...OR you know someone who fits either of those descriptions...

i TOLD you! i TOLD you santa claus was black! now will someone finally believe me? kris kringle was a brother and apparently so was ebeneezer scrooge.

i had one of these

as i've said earlier, nothing more enjoyable than a christian board game

except of course this, which might as well be called "scream at the tiny ball as it rolls into the hole AGAIN, and again and again and AGAIN AND AGAIN, then scream at your parents when they come into the room to find out what the hell you're screaming about, then scream at the police and and the ambulance and the emts as they come to sedate you and take you away to a locked, padded room where you will sit for a very very long time until you forget about balls and holes altogether"

sometimes i hate board games

finishing up, i should just say that if you have a few bucks to spare and some extra time on your hands (not that any of us really have either of those at the moment, but just suppose) i would highly recommend that you pick up one of the cheap, readily available, marginally functional vcrs that line the shelves of nearly every thrift store in town, and do yourself a favor and go hunting through the stacks to find some of the amazing bargains. this picture, by the way, is not one of them. highlander completely blows

i did however find "Radar Men From The Moon," a Bugs Bunny Movie, and a homemade MST3K tape that still had all the commercials on it, from 1993, 2 bucks each! AWESOME!

HELL YEAH!

d

11/4/2008 - Mid South Outlet

2008-10-21T17:07:00.004-05:00

hello kiddies, back again with another week's worth of sloppy minded commentary about dilapidated nonsense, we are bitter/books, sifting through other people's forgotten garbage so you don't have to

before we get started this week i'd like to dedicate this entry to two of the sweetest dearest kids that i know, karen and colin. karen is, despite what she might claim under pains of torture, my sister in law and one of the dearest people to me in the world. she was kind enough to pack up and move down here to memphis with us for a good six months before she started college, and holds the third place world record for putting up with my shit day in and day out for the longest amount of time (behind my wife and my mom, respectively). colin is her boyfriend. don't hold the afro against him, please.

anyway they came along with me on this visit, to the mid-south outlet in the bloody beating heart of summer ave and i'll be honest i was grateful for the backup because i got all kinds of hornswoggled. looking at these pictures now i just cannot even make head or tail of what i was looking at or thinking, and i think that's actually a fairly accurate communication of what it's like to try and shop in this damn place...just stuff all every which where and who knows what it is or what you're looking at or whether you like it or not but you'd better grab it because there are nine mexicans trying to shoulder past you to go look at the tupperware and jesu christe you pinche guero you're in the way!

this is an insanely large sport coat. i am 6ft roughly 175 lb and i wear a loose 42 most of the time. this damn thing must be for shaquille o'neal. GIVE IT UP FOR THE BROTHER!

thermoses. thermii? thermeliums? ther.....ahh forget it

i recently got my hands on a (mostly) working vcr, as recent readers will recall i was struggling to find one in my price range that actually looked like it might work for longer than nine seconds, and i happened to stumble across a yard sale where these folks were unloading a five dollar vcr - problem solved, sorry salvation army. you lose. anyway so now i've been looking for vhs tapes again, after a solid five year hiatus from the medium, and let me tell you, it has been enlightening to say the least. i forgot about so many movies. "going bananas?" forgot all about it. dom deluise, jimmie walker, and the kid from "over the top?" sold. if i thought i could watch this all the way through without at least one of the lobes of my brain exploding and shunting bloody guts and brain based organ matter all over the walls of my apartment i would have snagged it but that would be a real drag for my wife to have to clean up so i passed. plus if she got caught in the explosion she might be injured by pieces of my skull fragments or at least covered in gore, and no one wants that. come on.

as much of a crowded inconvenient pain in the ass as the mid south outlet can be at times, i really do love it, more for the little idiosyncratic touches than anything else, although isn't that what makes all these stores so great when you get down to it? remotes. a whole shelf of remotes, just tossed in there with everything else. i don't know what i love more, the fact that they took the time to separate out all the remote controls and shelve them off away from everything else, or the thought that someone up there in the mid south outlet organization thought that there would be some small but somehow philosophically important cross section of the shopping public that was out on the prowl for remote controls on any kind of semi-regular basis, and that they would effectively be cornering the market if they just took a little time and care to organize their stock the right way. well, you know what? they were right. next time i need a remote control i know where i'm going.

these are the tapes i got. all hilarious, all stuff i wouldn't care to buy on dvd probably, and all under $2.

what are these? any thoughts? they don't stand up on the other end so they're not vases. what the hell are they? i was stumped.

and then smoothly segued from being stumped by two basically simple shaped glass object to sherlock holmesing my way through this giant collection of buttons and switches...do you know what this thing is? it took me a minute. it's a sound effects box for a miniature train set. there were two speakers attached and i think the thing ran off of AA batteries or something. look again, at the picture. those are all train noises. this is a tiny box with speakers that just makes train noises. why did i not buy this again?

good luggage. no idea why i took this picture. this is also what happens when i take 2 weeks off between entries. my bad.

by and large the books here are usually kind of overpriced and the selection's not that great (although this visit there were a CRAPLOAD of beatles-related tomes that were marginally tempting, although all over my $5 cutoff) but this was over with the random mechanical junk, i guess to appeal to the gearheads, and i thought it was pretty sick. some of these car manuals aren't in production any more so it would kind of be a find, if you happened to have one of these...cars...or something. jesus i'm tired.

all right god dammit home stretch time. what, you may ask, does a collapsible straw hat look like? well...

i'd be happy to show you. bought this, no doubt. even tried it on, for a quick second, although my ingrained shame at the ridiculous size of my melon (8, in case you're counting...find THAT at "Lids") prevented me from taking a picture. but it looks dope on my wife, trust me. when spring comes we will rock the collapsible hat. god i have been waiting forever to say that sentence.

all right ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls...time for another round of everyone's favorite game...

WOULD

YOU

BUYIT?!?!???!?!?!?!?!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

this is a macintosh performa 550. it was $3. it came out in i think 1994 if memory serves. i didn't have one (i was still rockin' the IIvx) but i wanted one. it was $3. it had no power cord. or keyboard. or mouse. or indication one way or another of whether or not it worked even in the most tangential way or if it was just a piece of sculpture. it was $3. i have $3. what i DON'T have, sadly, is the spare space in my apartment to store ancient technology that i am deeply and sincerely in love with while i look for the accessories that are necessary to determine whether or not it even works in the first place, let alone time to perform said searches, or the repairs that would inevitably become necessary along the line. but. i ask you, dear readers, once again...

WOULDYOUBUYIT

answers in the form of a rebus this week plz i am tired of reading your long winded essays

this explains itself or if it does not then i can not explain it

things i saw on my way out. no idea

did you know you can get pulled over and arrested on one of these things if you're intoxicated? i just learned that.

okay well this haphazard mishmash of gobbledygook and mumbledypeg is going to grind to a halt for this week. would love to make a bunch of grandiose promises about returning to a regular schedule or something like that but that truth is i don't know when i'll be back at it. i've got another entry or two's worth of pictures and (as i hope you would just assume by now) no lack of things to say about them, i've just gotta find two spare hours to crank it all out. fear not though, gentle readers. bitter/books is here to take care of you, ever vigilant, semper fi and all of that. my advice for the moment though is

catch you on the flip

love

d

10/17/08 - Goodwill Highland St

2008-10-17T02:04:00.005-05:00

hello everyone. welcome back to bitter/books. very lucky for you that you showed up just now.

congratulations, in a way.

this week we explored the usually barren wastelands of the goodwill on highland street here in beautiful [adjective] memphis tennessee and found some wonderful delights, much to my surprise. my prior visits to this place have all sort of blown a proverbial fat one in one way or another, but this time i don't know, a groove was just gotten into and a good time was had by all. i guess it doesn't hurt that i made two of my best all time snags, completely out of nowhere, apropos of not even less than nothing at all, for about six bucks total. i get ahead of myself, though.

your humble narrator, shall we say less than pleased at the prospect of slogging through this place again...if only i'd known. you know what, i'm still smarting from the removal of the meteor-sized pothole that used to dominate about 60% of this parking lot, the first time i came by. i know it was inconvenient, bordering on illegal, but i kind of fell in love with the thing (you remember the scene from the end of the blues brothers movie where the illinois nazis drive their car off a half-finished freeway into a gigantic hole in the middle of the street and die? that size) and am still a little disappointed whenever i drive up and it's not there. but, in the spirit of true adventure journalism, we press on.

one thing i've noticed is that all these stores have their own little specialty, whether it's wacky t-shirts, cheap cds, old appliances, or hilarious framed shit to go up on your walls, there's always one thing that stands out. undeniably it's the objects d'art here, starting with this bad boy, this "piece," if you will. i didn't know the country alphabet contained the letters "cow," "egg," "rooster," and "sunflower," although what do i know, i'm only from black earth wisconsin, after all. i only gestated in the freaking bowling alley. what would i know?

as much as i might bitch i really do enjoy this place. they basically live in the shadow of the college and manage to keep a cheap decent thrift store open that, every time i've been there, seems to cater to the nearby ghetto contingent (i'm sorry but i don't know what else you'd call the nearby stretch of southern ave) a lot more than it does to the overeducated, overmoneyed college kids right down the road. hats off for that if no other reason. also for this amazingly godawfully gigantic floor fan which has never been turned on in any of my visits but which looks like it could probably power a small cessna if it had to. bully.

anyway back to the weird wall stuff. i read through this whole thing (about 17 paragraphs, it's as long as your leg, framed and everything) and it's not too painfully cliched or anything, although it might be a little on the hallmark card end of things, but it made me realize, moms invented emo. your mom was emo before emo was emo. this whole thing, by the way, totally homemade. no price tags, no trademarks, totally a labor of love. and now it's here. back story, anyone?

usual variety of weird games. we had one of these things when i was a kid, all the little carom rings and everything, but i don't think anyone ever played with it. eeeugh. you know, there's such a thing as "bringing back too many memories." gross.

more weird wall shit. this was the end part of a long plaque that apparently explains what it means to be hawaiian, by spelling out the word "aloha," letter by letter. i've had the good fortune to travel to hawaii twice in my life so far, i might go again next year, one of my oldest and dearest friends was born on kauai and grew up in honolulu and i will attempt to paraphrase what i think it means to be hawaiian by spelling out "aloha" letter by letter, since whoever wrote this plaque fucked it up so badly:

A stands for "A stupid fucking haole," which is what all the locals think you are, whether they ever say so or not.

L stands for "Lord i hate these stupid fucking haoles so god damned much with their cameras and money, please let them fuck off of my island so i can go back to living in my camper van on the beach in peace," which is what all the basically homeless locals think as you drive by them in your rented jeep

O stands for "Oh my dear god if one more fucking haole asks me if i know the words to "tiny bubbles" i swear to god i'm going to mow all these sons of bitches down with a fucking automatic rifle, i don't care how much they're paying me to play the ukulele at the marriott," which is what the guy who gets paid to play the ukulele at the marriott thinks

H stands for...well, you know.

and apparently A stands for something about how it's the hawaiians' fault that they basically got colonized. i don't know. to be fair it's a lot more complicated than i'm doing justice to here, but jesus. we basically treat these people like second class citizens, do nothing to offset the completely obscene cost of living out there while still taxing them out the eyeballs for everything you can imagine, and for what? for living on their own fucking land that we just decided was ours? for the fact that it's so beautiful? for wanting what every mainland american, black or white, has but not being in a position to be able to get it as easily as we can? i'll shut up here but just put yourself in their place for about nine seconds or so if you can spare the time and tell me how you feel

JUST A SMALL TOWN GIRL

LIVIN' IN A LONELY WORLD

TOOK A MIDNIGHT TRAIN GOIN' ANYWHERE...

here it is. find number one. there are no words to describe how amazing i felt when i stumbled upon this, stashed away underneath a small pile of "hang in there!" posters and hummel figurines. 1981. this thing is older than my wife and almost as old as i am. still in good shape, just needed a little windex and it's good to go. 1.99. basically...

i'll leave it at that.

plenty of decent records here, i'm sure, and not too expensive, but jesus? have none of these people ever owned an lp before? i'm no obsessive case but damn, this is no way to store the things. just for simple browsing reasons if nothing else, let alone the fact that you're more or less annihilating the poor records that happen to be at the bottom of the stack. needless to say i bought nothing from this giant pile of disorganized nonsense. step it up, goodwill on highland.

still looking for a damn vcr. i am so resistant to the idea of buying a new one from a new vcr store at this point that i'd rather spend a month just trolling around until i find a decent, cheap, functional looking older one, even if i have to breeze by shelves of stuff like this because it all costs a dollar or two more than i feel like paying. that's the whole idea with thrifting, people. you set your price point and you stick to it. if i didn't do that i'd have an apartment full of amazing old crap and books and appliances while i sat back and ate my own boiled shoe leather for breakfast lunch and dinner every day because i couldn't afford groceries.

stick to your guns is what i'm saying i think. either that or i want to eat my own boiled shoe leather like it was food.

i'll be honest i don't know what this is or why i took a picture of it. i tried looking it up on line and got nothing, and the fact of the matter is i honestly don't care enough to check back into it again now. i apologize to you and to myself for wasting all of our time in such a outrageous manner.

STOP THE PRESSES

STUPID ENGLISH DOUCHEBAG WRITES BOOK ABOUT THINGS THAT WERE IRRELEVANT TO BEGIN WITH BEFORE HE DECIDED HE WAS QUALIFIED TO WRITE ABOUT THEM, WHICH HE'S NOT

see also: nick hornby

i don't know what this thing is or was but it was full of plastic adhesive star stickers, which makes it double awesome, and i didn't buy it, which of course makes me double lame.

okay epilogue time...my second best find of the day (and possibly of all time) after the journey mirror was something that literally blew my head off the top of my shoulders and neck (which have more or less fused together by this point, from stress) but didn't bear photographing in the store, in the light. so, i give you, later on that evening, in the privacy and darkness of our dank weird apartment. the majesty, the glory, the singular mindbending wonder of the...

CRAZY MIRROR LIGHT BOX WACKINESS FUN TIMES!!!!!!

what is it? where did it come from? how the hell did it manage to stay in semi-functional shape all the way to my living room? these are questions i sadly cannot answer. all i know is it's AMAZING and it was like three bucks and you can replace the white bulbs with any colored ones from any string of christmas lights anywhere and i suppose it's a one way glass thing on the front and mirror plate on the back and it looks like it might be from the fifties or sixties or at least the seventies and it's a craaaaazy mixed up adventure into another dimension and i'm going to go look into it right now!

toodles!

d

10/7/08 - Park Avenue Thrift Store

2008-10-07T01:37:00.005-05:00

hi gang, welcome back to bitter/books. before we get started this week i have to share a self-portrait i took in homage of two of my favorite local bloggers:

now we is all shadows together.

moving on, this week we hit up the park avenue thrift store, on park avenue, of all places, and found some SWEET stuff and almost had some static but ended up making a new friend in the long run! i'll explain later. for now...

i'm pretty sure i posted a picture of this in our previous entry at this location but i wanted to remind everyone of a couple things:

1. this place is open on sunday, which automatically gives it a leg up over about 80% of the rest of the thrift stores in this town

2. on that day, all blue tags are discounted. good deal.

this store doesn't get enough love, partially i think because you have to drive through ORANGE MOUND SO SPOOKY to get there, and also because it's, well, a little on the dingy side. i love it, i really do - the size, the eclecticity (slappin' words together on the fly here people, STAY WITH ME) and the pricing, not to mention the convenient sunday hours make it one of my favorite destinations in town. if you don't have the time or the drive to go all the way out to austin peay or winchester then this is probably your next best bet.

it gets a little exhausting, at times, battling the mentality that the secondhand experience in this town begins with the salvation army on danny thomas and ends at the mid-south outlet on summer ave. those are great stores, to be sure, but you do yourself a disservice by not doing a little driving around and checking out what else is out there. the park ave thrift store shouldn't BELONG to orange mound, any more than overton park should belong to midtown or wolfchase mall should belong to freaking cordova or whatever. this is not denver or houston we're dealing with here, people. this town is not so freaking big that we have to get regional about it, it's all ours, if we want it. i sure do.

okay i'll stop yelling now. look at the cute little platelet! i assume that's what that is, anyway. the "smiling drop of piss holding an oreo cookie" is neither a logical or pleasing choice for a mascot, so i'm going with platelet for the moment. i flashed back to the nineties when i saw this, not just for the unbelievably lame and dated limp bizkit reference (so much so that it became extremely cute) but more for a time in my life when i would have grabbed this and bought it without a second thought. as is i think i'll appreciate the picture more in the long run.

when i was 13 i was a freshman in high school and the concert band (proud tubist, here) took a trip on spring break to daytona beach, florida. it was the first time i'd been south of the mason/dixon line and the first time i'd ever seen the ocean. amazing, unbelievable, memorable, certainly changed my life, yada yada. i mention it here because it was my first exposure to the crucial, undeniable, everpresent need for sunscreen. i managed to go out and get myself such a sunburn on my nose (thick hair and long bangs protected the rest of my face, thank GOD) that the skin actually cracked and freaking intercellular lymph fluid started leaking out of the damn thing. my nose looked like a fucking chicken wing, skin and all, i still have scars if you look close enough. anyway i mention all of this because (aside from the fact that it's hilarious and disgusting) i thought it was my platelets leaking out instead of relatively inconsequential lymph fluid and i had periodic panic attacks all the way back to new york every time i'd mop the damn thing off with a kleenex. bear in mind i was 13 and my lack of any substantive knowledge about human biology combined with a flair for the dramatic definitely made it all worse, but still. there is my platelet story. athankyou.

this kind of thing is almost enough to make a man want to change his wardrobe, just for the convenience of just being able to do it all at once if nothing else. six pairs of matching seersucker shorts, all my size too. i saw one of the guys from the barbaras at the liquor store rocking this look the other day and it gave me pause - of course he was about four inches taller than me and maybe 20 pounds lighter, not to mention like five years younger or so. you know what if we still lived in galveston i would have grabbed these, no questions asked, probably not even tried them on. it just doesn't make sense here the way that it would have there. over the course of three years in that town i managed to acquire the embarrassing habit of wearing deck shoes (slip-ons, you know what i mean) year round, because they're comfy and no one bats an eyelash at it in a place like that, but it makes me feel like kind of a stooge, doing it here. regional fashion conventions, transplanted to inappropriate locations. what a world.

on to something that wouldn't require any real shift in my wardrobe - periodically i get self-conscious about the fact that i rarely look at clothes, although i've outlined what i think are decent reasons for that approach in the past, every once in a while i feel a little guilty so i run through the t-shirts and suits and stuff, and i'm always pleasantly surprised by what i find. the realm of acceptable stuff that i can wear on my body is at a particularly narrow, monochromatic point right now but if closet space and fashion considerations weren't such a factor i'd be taking stuff home with me every week, without a doubt. you could too, anyone could. there are so many clothes at these places, it boggles the mind. more than you could look at in a day, even if you tried. there could be a whole other sister blog to this one, about nothing but the clothes, i assure you. as i've explained before it's not really my bent if you will, so it'd be a little disingenuous to spend THAT much time on it, but the stuff is there, i promise.

back to the weird old junk. i briefly considered trying to do a self-portrait with this thing by pressing my face into it (as we've all done at one point or another i assume) but then i looked around and considered the sheer chemical logistics of rubbing my face on anything that i found at the park avenue thrift store, especially something like this that seems to almost be asking for it, and i relented and just took this picture instead.

then it happened. i was meandering back into the stuffed animals/old toys/assorted junk area in the back corner when i heard one of the employees proclaim, loudly, "we've got someone taking pictures in here! hope he's not taking any pictures of me!" don't worry, lady. nothing personal but i think teddy ruxpin is a little more photogenic than you are. but, so, an issue, now. the last time that i got spotted taking pictures it basically ground the entire day to a halt and made me a little worried to go back to the store i was at in the first place because what if they don't like what they see?

this is sort of the elephant in the room about this whole project, i guess. i want to document these places as they are, not as they'd like to present themselves, and show people (both my readers and anyone who might work there and be associated with the place) how beautiful they are in their natural state, and if i go in and start introducing myself to the people behind the counter...it's the observer effect, just played out in a secondhand shop instead of a physics laboratory. i've made passing mention of stealth before and it's not like i'm a freaking ninja or anything - i don't shoot this blog on a spycam, fer crissakes - but i do try to keep a low profile and lately i've been getting a little lazy, especially in the larger stores where you can sort of fade into the aisles, but yeah so i was a little too conspicuous this time out and i got noticed. but nothing else was said, no one approached me or anything, for the moment anyway, so i just tried to blend in (yeah right) and get my work done without worrying about it (i freaked out).

why have i not bought one of these things yet? crushed ice, ready, at your disposal, for all your old timey cocktail needs. you scoff, i can hear you, i can smell your thoughts, even through my tinfoil helmet. but have you ever tried a cocktail with crushed ice, as opposed to cubes, that is? think about it for a second. smoother, better, easier drinking, you don't have to deal with bumping your damn teeth on glacier sized blocks of ice that try to smash your incisors out and slide down your throat and make you choke and kill you and such? hm? i'm sayin. and they're everywhere (the ice crushers are), and they're always so freaking cheap...i guess it's just an issue of real estate in my kitchen, it's already overflowing with weird, single-function appliances and ancient beer mirrors on the walls, i am mildly reluctant to introduce yet another note into that particular symphony of clutter, but someday i will, i'm sure.

what is it? i am afraid. what does it do? don't know. neither do the people who work here, assuredly, but they slapped a $20 price tag on it and tossed it out there. the picture doesn't really do it justice but it's big, man, like old vcr big, and it has such a paucity of dials and sliders on the front that it makes me think it's designed to do like one thing but just do the living shit out of it. like, instantly, and very strongly, like the type of thing you need to put goggles on for or perhaps stand behind some type of curtain or shield. i don't know, it's probably nothing, but i kept imagining like some mad scientist or val kilmer from real genius just walking up with a shopping cart and throwing it in there and running out the door, cackling. i almost did.

also enormous, although again not really conveyed by the picture. in case it's not blisteringly clear by now i love old appliances and technology dearly and if i had my way i'd be posting this freaking blog off of an apple IIe with one of those ancient dot matrix printers that only used that perforated banner paper and sounded like a constipated robot when it printed. maybe someday.

on to saucier delights. i took an informal poll of my friends and coworkers, and only people who were a lot older than i am remembered champale, which makes me think it wasn't so much a memory from my own head as much as something that i just plucked from the ether through sheer dumb luck, but when i saw this, something clicked. if you have no idea what this stuff is read about it here. if you need to know why it's hilarious, just hang on a second, i'll scare up some pictures.

case in point.

any questions?

oh dear lord they even got nina. nina simone, ladies and gentlemen, high priestess of soul...for champale. lord.

okay home stretch time. just wanted to toss in a wide shot for those who aren't familiar with this store - it's huge, maybe not airplane hangar sized like some of the ones in bartlett but it's still big as hell

got some really neat books and stuff - that's north by northwest on vhs for a buck, and at the bottom of the stack, the complete 2 volume set of the entire shooting scripts for monty python's flying circus, like 2 bucks a piece. sure, why not

saw this on my way out...the seventies must have been amazing

same basic sentiment here, requisite muppet record (there's always at least one) but this one...looks strange. i don't know.

so. here's what happened, roughly. i took my little stack of books and my champale sign (you didn't think i left it there, did you?) and checked out. went outside, tossed my stuff in the car and started to head back in to get a picture of these sinfully hideous "ugg" boots (named so for the verbal reaction all decent people have upon seeing them) when a guy bearing an uncanny resemblance to a young george lucas calls over to me:

"i gotta ask, man...what's with the pictures?"

so we get to talking, about what a basically harmless and quixotic venture this all is, and i'm just thinking that he's curious about what a big white guy with a weird haircut in a beat up suit is doing buying all this shit in the first place, but then he tells me he's the general manager and i have a brief instant of "fuuuuuuuck" but it turns out the guy just wanted to know what i was up to, and he was totally friendly and we shot the shit about thrift stores and crap from the eighties (he looked roughly my age, maybe a little older, hard to tell) and all kinds of stuff for a while, i gave him my email so he'd let me know when they do their periodic book clearance sales (something i did not know about) and in the end it was all good, crisis averted. i think we both just had fun talking shop for a while, it's not exactly a topic of conversation that your average guy on the street can roll with for too long, soooo....yeah. good times.

and that'll do it for this week, i'm trying to adopt a routine where i shoot a week ahead so any time between now and the next weekday i have off look forward to an update detailing my trip to the goodwill on highland which will BLOW YOUR FREAKING MIND but i'm contractually obligated to leave it at that for the moment and thank you all for reading once again and invite all comments, salacious emails, saucy polaroids, and love poems to be directed to the usual outlets. talk to you all again very soon, dearies.

love

d

10/3/08 - MIFA Store, Salvo Danny Thomas

2008-10-03T11:52:00.002-05:00

hi all. back again like that itchy rash the doctor told you would go away if you JUST STOPPED SCRATCHING IT FOR A WHILE fer crissakes, it's bitter/books, bravely trundling through the arid tundra of memphis tennessee's thrift stores, junk shops, and secondhand emporiums to show you the soft creamy nougat center of the proverbial wow i am so bored with writing this sentence already, forget it.

bitter/books

Salvation Army Kirby Whitten Rd

Goodwill Bonanza pt 2/3

Amvets/Salvo Danny Thomas (Special I Love Memphis Edition!)

Goodwill Bonanza pt 1/3

Community Dolla Warehouse

CLOT FURN HOU... i mean... amvets presley blvd

The MIFA Store

Salvation Army Danny Thomas

Goodwill Austin Peay

Salvation Army Austin Peay

sad news

Goodwill Main St, Southaven

how does one spoon "for" someone, exactly?

secondhand hawaiians

andy wise, park ave thrift, MIFA

Amvets 02/15

goodwill southaven

bibles for missions, house of grace

goodwill book store

new store(s)!

Community Dolla Warehouse

the book, the monkey, and the golf clubs

Compromised Summer's Eve

TEETH!

psychedelic serenity prayer

awwww....

come on...

what is it? (1)

comic nerds ahoy

fondue, anyone?

space cadets

umpty millionth nautical clock picture

lesotho coffee cup

11/26/2008 - DAV Mendenhall

11/11/2008 - Amvets Elvis Presley Blvd

11/4/2008 - Mid South Outlet

10/17/08 - Goodwill Highland St

10/7/08 - Park Avenue Thrift Store

10/3/08 - MIFA Store, Salvo Danny Thomas

Literary Interlude - The English Major Bookstore

8/28/08 - Amvets Presley Blvd

8/19/08 - Goodwill Stage Rd, Goodwill Austin Peay

8/14/08 - Nancy's (Summer of Eeeeuuugghhh), DAV Mendenhall

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