You know that saying the best laid plans of mice and men?
I don't really know the rest of the saying, that's the only part
I know. But.. my best laid plans just went. (BOOM)
My plans blowing up isn't always a bad thing. I was shooting a
video in the bus. And right in the middle of it, I got the
word. Everything's worked out. And we can finally pick the
date. The house can go on the market. So we picked a date,
and it's soon. So now my whole energy, everything has to shift
to getting everything out of this house, emptying it all out.
Today's Friday, I have to get everything I possibly can out by
Monday. And you can see there's still a lot of shit in this
house.
One thing I really need to get under control, one thing I'm
drowning in is Ephemera.
Dictionary Voice: Ephemera. Noun. Things that exist or are
used or enjoyed for only a short time.
Mary: Ephemeral is you know, things that are ephemeral. It's
antique or vintage paper: advertisements, old labels,
maps, usually things are made to expire at a certain point and be
replaced. But also photos and letters and postcards and things
that express a particular moment in time, almost always made of
paper.
Now I want to be clear, this isn't personal stuff with deep
attachments. The family photos I've dealt with already. The
dozens of newspapers my dad saved in the attic. Yeah, those
are mostly in the trash unless they're historically
significant. And then they get added to the ephemera because
this is stuff that I sell. This is merchandise. When I had my
store, people want me to come to their house because they had an
estate to get rid of. There was always paper, lots of different
pieces of paper saved for one reason or another. And there
were always lots of magazines. I'd take the magazines and take
any other pieces of paper that looked interesting because I
figured I could sell them. But I discovered that I couldn't get
anybody to give me four bucks for a 1960s copy of Life
magazine. But I could get them to give me four bucks for a
single ad with good colors and nice graphics ripped out of that
magazine. So Life turned out to be way more valuable parted out
the left hole, I tear out the ads, trim them, package them in
archival plastic with a card behind. And that's how I ended
up with a lot of this stuff. Wasn't stuff I was looking for.
It just kind of appeared.
There are passionate collectors for pretty much any kind of
paper out there. Well, for example, I know a guy who
collects only old insurance policies, and another one that
collects only old driver's licenses. That's all he
collects. I don't know really why people get so specific like,
the receipts, the train schedules. We put our hands on
so much paper every day, the paper we choose to save or maybe
we don't choose to save, it just gets left around, It's very
human in a way. It documents the times we live in, the things we
like to do, better, probably, than anything else.
I planned to sell ephemera in bus life. It's one of the things
I figured I'd hang on to because it's practically free and you
can get really decent money for it if you're not in a hurry. But
the problem is paper is heavy. And it takes up way more space
than you think. And these plastic archival things are
really slippery. So I'm keeping some things, mostly weird stuff
that just kind of strikes my fancy, but mostly it's time to
get rid of it. Along with every single other thing in this
house.
At this point, I'm not going to worry about money anymore. I
just need everything gone. So I put all the postcards in a box
and listed it on Facebook for free and somebody who collects
postcards came to get it. I put the recipes in the cookbooks in
a box and that went to a cookbook collector, the ads, the
sheet music, the art magazines, the celebrity magazines, people
came they they took everything. They came and took pretty much
everything in the house. There's hardly anything left.
you remember those chairs. I cried over those chairs at
Brimfield, over how nobody wanted these beautiful things
made by hand 200 years ago by somebody skilled and passionate.
And that's why I don't think I'll never be able to call
myself a minimalist. I have too much respect for what humans do
with their hands and their imaginations to ever think of
something like that as just stuff. But respecting something
doesn't mean I have to have it in my bus. I mean, it only fits
so much.
I didn't make my money back in those chairs. I gave them away
for free on Facebook. But they didn't go to a landfill and I
had a hand in that. Somebody's beautiful 200 year old work is
going to have a new life in Jennifer's breakfast nook. It's
kind of appropriate they're just about the last thing to go.
It's empty now. The countdown begins. For real.