The Psychology Of Junk

     The visitor strolled up the driveway leading to the house that I grew up in and announced this without even the smallest amount of pretentiousness.
     "I'm a Bundler."
     Now, I didn't even know what that meant.  My sister - who was expertly running our garage sale in, as it turns out, a pretty successful fashion to get rid of stuff in an All-American way - was able to see through the gentleman's lingo and understood that he was there to buy numerous items.  At a discount, naturally.  Which was fine with us.
     The term "bundling" apparently comes from one of those reality shoes like "American Pickers".  Or so I'm told.  I've seen re-runs of it but don't watch it on a regular basis.  I

find it a lot more realistic than something like "Pawn Stars" which, to me, is sort of a reverse-engineered garage sale in that stuff still trades hands but the ones getting fleeced also have to bear the indignity of having to physically carry their unwanted things to the sacrificial altar, as in:  Customer:  I'll not take less than $1,000 for it.  Rick:  I'll give you $150.  Customer:  (Thinks, and multitasking while at rolling over at the same time)...Well, OK.  Too much trouble to haul it back home, I guess.
     And so forth.
    See, garage sales back in the day used to be a lot less....something.  Less competitive, maybe.  You just sat stuff out and whomever showed up showed up.  There was no Craiglist, only newspaper ads; no mega-neighborhood groupings, just a card table or two and one humble abode; no disrespectful cutthroat early buyers but instead socially acceptable mid-morning arrivals.  Like the junk is going anywhere, people.
     See, what has happened is this:  Television shows like American Pickers have turned

the turning over of all things Great Unwashed into some sort of quest to be the first to spend seventy-five cents for one of those old liquid-filled birds that you used to be able to find in gag shops alongside the plastic globs of fake vomit.  One guy walked up to me at our sale and wanted to know what my "bottom line" was on an old Coke clock that I literally got out of the trash at an old job.  Before I could barely knock 30% off, he had me down 50% and I was agreeing faster than a high school boy would if Jennifer Aniston had asked him to prom.  
     I had caught the fever.
     I still think that people get star-struck when they see two average guys turned television stars riding around the country, crawling and getting immeasurably dusty looking for whatever they can find and turn over for a profit.  It's caused even more average people to stroll onto someone's home turf and practically demand that they give up something that's been in their household for as long as they can remember for $2.00 and thank them for the privilege.  Now, I'm all for being entertained but the marriage of television and junk finding has set back the cause of garage sales much in the same way as the movie "Deliverance" set back the cause of Hillbillyism by oh, a couple centuries or so.
     I don't recall if Mr. Bundler bought anything but if he was expecting to find some great lost artifact that he could flip over for retirement money, I know he got disappointed.  The closest thing I had to an artifact but which I couldn't bear to sell was my old Rock'em Sock'em robot game which I nearly put out - sans plastic composite ropes - but I still have too many good memories of receiving it one Christmas and I can

still hear the "cccccccccckkkkkkdddooosh" sound that gets made whenever one of the noggins goes a-flyin'.
     So for now, the little red and blue "Dragos" will continue to sit down in the basement gathering dust.  They're forever frozen in their stances, dancing on a platform with no borders and nothing to keep them there except for their inertia which, come to think of it, describes the lives and problems of a vast majority of people.  "Dancing on a platform with no borders and nothing to keep them there except for their own inertia."  I like that.  And if I had to construct a diatribe and trash such an All-American and simple event like a garage sale to come up with such a particular turn of a phrase, so be it.
     I can be cruel that way.
     Hmmmm.  You never know what little nuggets of wisdom like that are out there waiting for you to find.  But you gotta swing a punch or two, jump off the platform and start searching.  Because chances are it won't come strolling up your drive looking for a bargain.