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Budweiser Dude
Sunday, April 12 2009
It's springtime and the weather is improving by the day, with occasional setbacks. Today was such a setback, with a bitter wintery chill in the air despite the strong April sun. It's almost yard sale season, and the truly desperate in our society have already begun selling off their shit. At some point today Penny and David found happened upon a pre-season yard sale and Penny called and said she'd found some great stuf off route 28. Some dude was selling his bandsaw, a vice, and a sheets of styofoam. Penny and David were just going to pick it all up for me but then they realized it wouldn't possibly fit in their Land Rover. So I drove over.
On my arrival, the joke from David was that this yard sale was a hot woman at a bar and that his and Penny's yardsaling relationship to me was a marriage. Regarding this yard sale, which he and Penny had gone to without me, he said, "We got drunk, but it doesn't mean anything."
This yardsale was being held at the residence of a gentleman who had, like many others across the land, fallen on hard times. His wife had dumped him, he was underwater on his mortgage, and he hadn't made a mortgage payment in 17 months. One has to assume he must have also suffered some sort of tragedy in his employment status. And here it was, 11am on a Sunday, and he was drinking a Budweiser. Grateful Dead blared from the stereo. It was that spacey sort of Dead, the kind where there is a single muted pluck of a distortion-free guitar string every three or four seconds (and not much else except the hiss of bad recording equipment and audience noise). It never made any sense to me, but it totally blows some people's minds. Budweiser Dude appeared to be selling off a fairly well-stocked garage of woodworking tools (with the exception of his massive floor-mounted drill press). The bandsaw looked like a quality Craftsman model, and Penny and David had already negotiated the price down from $75 to $50. The $15 dollar vice I'd given them permission to buy for me lacked a mounting plate, but it was big and powerful so I'd probably find a use for it. The sheets of two inch thick styrofoam were the best deal there, a steal for only a dollar each. There's no limit to how much styrofoam I can use on my greenhouse. I also bought a little table-mounted loop sander suitable for sanding small wooden objects. Meanwhile Penny and David had bought a beautiful little woodstove for a friend for $100. Flush with funds, Budweiser Dude decided to go to Hurley Ridge Market to get himself some lunch and additional Budweisers. He asked us if we could maybe run his yardsale for him for the twenty minutes or so he needed, adding that we could help ourselves to bong hits inside. We had nothing we needed to be going to, so we said sure. By the time he came back, we'd already loaded that heavy woodstove into the back of David's Land Rover.
Penny and David stopped at our place on their way home, and the four of us hung out for awhile sunning ourselves in the driveway (as is common in this season). But eventually the chill of the wind drove us indoors. Eventually the client came by with his new girlfriend to pick up her laptop, the one I'd been fixing yesterday. He ended up talking shop with David about the career they share: journalism, which is one of many industries not to be in during these particular times.
At some point I was pulled away from all of this by the demands of a hairy website migration project that I'd begun back in Virginia.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090412 feedback
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