Goddamn am I tired today.

Yesterday, which must of placed among the hottest days this year, M. and I sweated over a yard sale and netted over $400 in cash, credit and checks. That’s about $80 bucks an hour, or $40 each, selling shit I could just as easily thrown out or given to charity for a task deduction.

There’s still plenty of shit to sell to empty this place, so I’m gonna give it a whirl solo next weekend with stronger advertising. Maybe I can con or pay a buddy to join me for the day and supply some bathroom breaks. As I won’t have to drive to the airport later, it could be a mellow day of malt liquor and chatting with friends and neighbors.

At some point, I’ll write scathing shit about assholic folks looking for extraordinary (as in why don’t I just wrap my shit up like a gift and hand it to you for nothing?) bargains. Last time I had a yard sale was in a different, apparently more upscale neighborhood. Those folks could recognize my pricing was generous. Yesterday’s neighborhood people were ruthless and rude.

“Ah, no, fuckhead, I’m not gonna give you that guitar and amp both for $25, which I said would be $50, and I already told you the musicians next door have offered $35 for the amp alone. And, you know what else, shithead? I don’t have to sell you that Nikon camera body that accidentally fell into the 50 cents box for 50 cents. This ain’t Walmart; it’s my fucking yard.”

I hated that guy by the end of the day. He kept coming back, sifting through everything throughout the day, tsk-ing and scolding me and telling me I was wrong and ‘didn’t I know it was a yard sale’ and then not buying anything. Fucking irritating. At the end, I let him buy a portable CD player for 50 cents. Even then he scolded me and kept asking if it worked.

Dude, it’s a fucking yard sale, you just handed me two quarters, caveat fucking emptor already.

The highlights of the sale in no particular order were drop ins by various comic scenesters, getting some good karmic mojo over selling the ex-boy’s wall-hanging to a liberal-ish, multi-culti loving, car-full of mixed raced children, middle-aged Cambridge chick who honestly seemed to love and appreciate it and its origins, and the impromptu jam of my neighbors’ testing the amp in the garage adjacent to my yard, while a heavy-metal dude and his Jamaican girlfriend wandered up to chat, play and try to get my neighbors to resell the guitar and at the same time I discovered and tested my old set of juggling clubs.

M. not only put up with this hard work, he grooved on the unfettered capitalism and bragged on my salesmanship to total strangers.

Summer in the city.