Brain Top Off!

What’s more fun, the garage sale or the hunt for the sale when we find ourselves with an insatiable hunger to go out and find stuff? For sure, humans (being the cheapskates at heart they really are) would say that the sale itself is the most fun but it’s probably the case that the actual hunt is most enjoyable above all else. We’ve convinced ourselves, after all, that we need more stuff and were going to get it anyway we can.

Whole industries have sprung up on the notion that hitting garage sales is one of the great American pastimes, though why someone would consider a digital sport watch found a garage sale as being similar to finding the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean is a question for the ages. At any rate, people’s eyes tend to glaze over with greed and lust whenever they spot an open garage with a bunch of stuff in front of it.

So, then, what does one say when one finds one’s self out and about in a myriad of local neighborhoods on a Saturday morning searching for signs of a garage sale? Usually, if we’re garage sale enthusiasts, we don’t say much of anything other than ‘point me to that electric guitar for sale at the garage sale down the street.’ Unfortunately, that garage sale is probably being run by a couple of elderly ladies actually selling lace doilies.

Never mind that that guitar probably can be bought new just as cheaply these days down at the local department store, which is really saying something about how versatile retail sales can be on occasion. At any rate, one must think of hitting garage sales as being more like going out on one of those old-time African safaris, for instance, complete with bush jackets and pith helmets and beaters to drive all of that garage sale game towards the hunter.

Maybe one has decided that the spare bedroom that’s now unoccupied because Junior has gone off to college would make the perfect fitness room and the need for a bit of fitness equipment has now arisen. This is so even when an expensive gym membership was purchased just a few months ago and has been used a grand total of one time, right? That high-tech fitness-room-to-be certainly needs some stuff and the garage sale is the place to get it.

The reality of things, though, is that we really might not find much of true worth when we go out on these hunts but it’s still a vicarious pleasure we find in the hunting. We might turn up a case of old 33 RPM record albums (even though we don’t have a stereo phonograph) and we have to have it. Besides, those albums might be of bands that we once danced to way back in high school.

The bottom line about garage sales and the hunt for them is that it’s probably the case that we need to be out there searching for stuff because it’s in our DNA. Our ancestors were hunter/gatherers and we are, too. Nowadays, we might be hunting and gathering extraneous stuff that we might never use, but we certainly love the fact that we’re out there hunting, even when the hunt turns up nothing much of importance for us.