Garage Sales And The Hunt For Them

Garage sales and the hunt for them present two adventures for the typical human being, who’s actually a cheapskate at heart. The first — and probably most intense adventure — is the hunt for the garage sale, which many people would actually say is more viscerally satisfying than the garage sale itself, if one were being honest. Once we’ve convinced ourselves that stuff in all its glory is what we need, the need to hunt for it becomes intense.

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.

The guitar advertised for sale probably went long ago and those doilies are the only things left, so a box of them probably will end up in the basement or the attic because everybody knows a garage sale in which nothing was bought is like an African safari in which not even a lonely and forlorn gazelle happened to be spotted. And, truly, hunting for a garage sale is kind of like going out on a safari in many respects.

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.

In reality, it hardly makes a bit of difference whether or not we really managed to locate anything of any worth at one of these sales. Instead, we’re just like those big game hunters of olden times; we’re out for the biggest game we can find, which in this case means maybe a box of old 1970s-era disco music cassettes that we once danced wildly to in our high school days. It kind of thrills us like getting on a roller coaster used to do.

In the end, adventures in garage sale hunting are in and of themselves a lot of fun. Who cares if we really find anything we like as long as we get out there and scour the neighborhoods like some modern day Treasure Hunt contestant or like a band of pirates desperately following the map to some fabled buried treasure? Usually, the treasure is never found or has already been looted before we get there but we’ll talk for years about the adventure.

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