YARD SALE AT DAWN

("Beep-beep-beep" went the nasty little needles into my brain. . .)

After weeks of waking up when the sun came over the mountain, rolling out of bed to the sad yelping of a digital alarm clock was a real drag. But I had to get up! This was made plain by my wife's leaving her bedside lamp turned on as she disappeared into the bathroom. Usually she slips away quietly and has an hour or so of peace before I fling the covers back and find the floor. No, I am not a "morning person," though I get all my best ideas from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. Today was different, however: yard sale day!

"My God, it's black as pitch outside! 5:43 A.M.?! It's not even dawn yet!" (They tell me a considerable portion of the world's population lives this way. . .no wonder we don't all live to be a hundred! Someone should do something.) But in our corner of Maryland's Eastern Shore this Saturday morning, no one was stirring except dairy farmers, the Baltimore Sun delivery person, and a couple of locals with junk to sell. That would be us.

And did we have junk!

Good junk, of course. Quality stuff. Like the antediluvian John Deere 110 I had sold a day earlier after parking it out by the road with a spray-painted "For Sale" sign. The Deere had seen better days but was still a magnificent green beast, attractive enough at $150 to be snapped up by a passing sheetrock installer and his helper. It wouldn't start, but for that price it didn't have to, and we somehow got it into the back of his pickup. He spied the lawn sweeper: "How much you want for that? Thinking fifty, I said "Twenty." He said, "Shit, throw it on there!"

That's how you sell things, at least if you're desperate enough to be sensible. Too bad I haven't been able to pull off the same trick with the old house. (Our agent, a very cagey and experienced lady, thinks we should hold the current price until we get an offer. So be it.) For all our other possessions though, it's Discount City! I advertised our old LC II, complete with monitor, Stylewriter, CD-ROM drive, and genuine IKEA computer desk for $100. What a deal! -- but no one wanted it, except the 4th grade at a local elementary school, so we're donating it to them. It's perfect, of course, our cute little slow-as-molasses bulletproof LC II I used to call "The Two Thousand Dollar Typewriter."

You can't think about things like that if you want to get rid of them, even though I did think just those thoughts as I hauled precious possessions out of the house and arranged them on tables in the yard. There was light on the Eastern horizon, or what passes for one in this part of the world, but the sun was still lost in the murk. The grass was wet, the ground soggy from a heavy, all-night rain. That's what the weather people call "showers" in the East. Back in New Mexico, a "shower" is a 30-second splatter. (Squish, squish, squish. . .)

The first person to show up was our old friend Shirley, someone who can be counted on to buy a van-load of things she doesn't need and can barely afford. (Boy, was I glad to see her!) As my wife and I stood there explaining why we were giving up everything we had to start a new life in a strange expensive place, God played one of his little jokes: the sun had finally risen high enough to send a broad, flat wedge of orange-red light through a break in the treeline about a mile to the east, backlighting the soybean field across the road. SHAZAM!! For about 20 seconds the soybeans were on fire, as sublime a soybean moment as I had ever witnessed. A huge honking V-formation of Canada geese flew overhead. Aw, geez!

Why is it always like this?

You know, like the last time you have sex with someone you're breaking up with. The way my '62 Plymouth station wagon ran the day I finally found a buyer for it. The way I've been connecting at 44Kbps almost every time, now that I'm about to dump my ISP. Why, I'll bet that on the way out of here, there won't be any traffic jams on the Bay Bridge or the Baltimore Beltway, and someone on Interstate 70 will execute a stunning act of courtesy that will have me shaking my head for days!

Anyway, selling, tossing, and packing. . . here is where the consequences of making plans based on the early August pre-ordering of a tangerine iBook come home to roost. These machines, as you may know, exist only in the realm of science-fiction or Uncle Stevie's daydreams. (I thought I saw him playing with one at Macworld Expo in New York, but I must have been mistaken. If you email me to say you have one, I'll know you're a lying swine of Satan sent to torment me and run to the market for shotgun shells to exorcize my monitor!) So for now, here I sit in my genuine fake leather "executive's chair" in front of my trusty PowerMac 8600, perched on a lovely laminated slab of mystery wood resting on shiny black steel sawhorses -- my "computer desk," in other words. The movers are coming in 5 days and we're leaving in 9. Uh-oh. . .

(wobble, wobble, wobble)

Honking geese, flaming beanfields, and familiar people, contrasted with imminent refugee status, can either bring you down or set you up for the next Big Lesson. In this instance I was actually educated the night before, when at my wife's insistence I put some drops in my left ear, temporarily blocking all hearing on that side. Genetic predisposition and years of playing my electric 12-string much too loudly with the Twin Reverb at my right ear had uh, somewhat slowed audio data transmission through that interface. I knew this, of course, since at my last physical I was still waiting for the nurse to test my right ear when she informed me that she already had. . . but we tend to suppress these things, right? So the night before the yard sale, when I put the drops in my left ear and shut it down for a moment, it was: hey, who put the cotton in my right ear?? Nobody??? (Aaaaghhhh!!!)

And then, DOUBLE SHAZAM! Instant passing gear! Cosmic kickdown! Sell everything! Put the PowerMac on my lap! Load that truck and get moving! Go, go, go! (I hope you understand. I hope my friends here in Merryland understand. I hope Apple Computer understands and gives that production line a kick in the ass.)

When we get back to the mountains I'm staying up all night, buying a G3 upgrade card, and plugging in the Gibson again. Call it a mission.

And watch out!

John H. Farr also edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives have links to all past columns and occasional snippets of biographical info.

To be notified whenever the column is updated, just send a message titled "Subscribe FSN" to this address.

Official Farr Site Advice: own nothing. Collect nothing. Forget about "security". (You'll be glad you did. . .)

.

February 10, 2012