Snoqualmie

I have found love, and its name is Crap.

Jacob and I went to Urban Ore today, on the flimsy excuse that they might have bricks we could use for the backyard. I didn't see any bricks while we were there, but it's possible that that was because I was eyeball-deep in so much dirty, jumbled junk that I couldn't have seen bricks if they were 3 feet in front of me. But who cares about bricks anyway, when we came home with a book, a kitchen chair, a static duster on a long stick, a muffin tin, a corkscrew, and a hand mixer? I came close to also buying a sewing machine table, a copper bundt pan, several pounds of large hex nuts, a grey thermal shirt, and two small wooden fu dogs. I don't think Jacob knew about the fu dogs, but they were weighing heavily on my mind.

This brings me to my essential point: I have a long-standing, obsessive, passionate love of crap. Not just stuff in general, but crap. Piles of discarded, disordered, cheap, mismatched things turn my crank like crazy. Bonus points if they're unnecessary, redundant, or, indeed, entirely useless. This is why I love thrift stores, and it's why I particularly love the East Bay Depot for Creative Re-Use. It's why I have a spool of five thousand small blue resistors under my desk. It's why my fingers start itching every time I walk past the storefront on Adeline Street where the antique store keeps its hundreds of pieces of extra furniture. Who cares if they're only chairs, and I couldn't fit another chair into my house if I tried? I don't care. They're stacked up in a messy heap and nobody wants them, and therefore, I want them.

I have to touch them, too. It's not enough just to look, or to pick up and place into a basket for buying. If I see a bin of assorted shelf standards I have to pick one of them up. If I find a perfectly ordinary potato peeler, but it happens to be at the bottom of a box of rusty knives, I'll risk grievous bodily injury to reach in and pull it out. Then I'll probably tell myself an outright lie, like, "I think I'll start a potato peeler collection," to justify buying it.

It's probably some kind of socially-conscious kleptomania. I don't believe in stealing, but paying thirty cents for a kitchen implement is almost like stealing, so hey! I think I'll do it. Certainly I know that I can afford to buy a much larger quantity of disorderly crap than of new shiny nice things. 'Course, that doesn't really stop me from lusting after new shiny nice things either. Expect another entry about that when I come home from Sur La Table. I need to find a pair of $10 replacement beaters for my $5 mixer.