The Life Of A Garage Sale Addict

It’s a fact these days that a multitude of people are really into hitting garage sales on a Saturday or Sunday or both. When to admit when one is addicted to garage sales, hopefully, never arises because there’s almost nothing too crazy about hitting them. They can be a way of getting the things one needs but also finding the things that one really wants.

There’s an important distinction there, between needing and wanting, and a garage sale seems to fulfill at least the second characteristic (wanting). We might not need an Ibanez electric guitar, but we most certainly want it — especially when we’re a young man or boy of a certain age and with dreams of guitar or rock stardom dancing around in our heads, even if we’re 70 years old.

After all, it’s usually the case that the only difference between men and boys are the cost of the toys that they spend money on to accumulate and then never use. Consider that most men have also dreamed of being an Olympic downhill skier. And to prove it, go check the basement for all the alpine skiing equipment that they went out and bought at a garage sale the year before.

Just about every man and his wife or girlfriend will aver that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with going out there and finding that kind of stuff at a garage sale because, number one, it’s probably going to be cheap and, number two, the men are at least out there moving around and not sitting in front of a TV drinking beer and getting fat. This might justify the cost of that equipment right there.

And that’s where the beauty of garage sales come in; for they can be held at just about any time — though they’re most popular during the summer months — and for whatever reason. Need some extra money to finally put in that dormer? Well, hold a garage sale and get rid of all the junk that can help to fund the dormer.

Even the winter months can be a time to hold a garage sale. Just plop a portable space heater down in the garage and get to work holding one. And if going to other people’s garage sales is the thing most dear to one’s heart, driving endlessly in big swooping loops around the 20 different neighborhoods in the vicinity of the garage sale can help feed that addiction quite nicely.

Sociologists and anthropologists are probably having a field day with this country’s obsession with garage sales, both the holding of them and the searching for them. But, they just don’t know how alluring finding some obscure set of record albums by some Greek Pan flute player can be, now do they?