The Method To My Madness

Thrift Shopping

Dear Reader,

So I guess if you read the title of this letter you realized this is about thrift shops. I'm going to make the assumption that you've heard the song Thrift Shop by Macklemore. I think my favorite part is where the guy says "this is fucking awesome" because it is..... Unless you live in my area. You can't find shit. EVER.

I once volunteered at a thrift shop for a few weeks in the middle of summer. I don't know if you've ever been in the back of a thrift shop but when you leave you come out covered in dust and quite literally smelling like "R Kelly's sheets..... (pissssssss)". It's not a lie. The one I volunteered at was associated with the Christian ministries therefore all profits went towards the community. The back of the thrift store was a big warehouse filled with JUNK. The creepy part was when things were brought in they would be placed in dangerously large categorized piles with weird names like furniture forests and toy town. I worked in holiday hollows and clothes country. I always wondered why they called it clothes country though. I mean it was more like clothes mountain. This place would take the clothes and throw them on top of a pile that went from the dirt coverd floors to the cobweb covered ceilings and my job was to climb Mt. Clothesmore and sort items.

I even lost a shoe in the mix of baby barf stained shirts and jackets drowned in grandma perfume. And this was not just any shoe. I lost a brand new neon orange high top conver with zombie hello kitty shoe laces. I never did find the shoe. I also got sucked into a vortex of socks and had to have someone climb up to pull me out of my near death experience. Luckily my friends were volunteering with me and one afternoon they were kind enough to take a hanger, shove it down my shirt, and hook me up to the pully system. They then sent me on a 30 minute ride where I couldn't stop sneezing because of all the dust I was kicking up. It only ended because a scary dragon lady came over and snatched me off the line then yelled at me while my friends hid behind a giant elephant statue. This woman acted like I enjoyed being suspended in the air by a hanger stuffed down my shirt. I can't blame my friends though because the place could get real boring real fast and when I look back on it that was my favorite part of that summer vacation.  

Anyways back on topic, I like thrifting because each item has a past. I mean when I walk in the stores and I look at the stuff I tend to picture a bunch of dark mysterious guys with troubled pasts that I'll never know. I try not to think that someone else wore or used the item before me but even if I do think about it the fact that it's been used doesn't bother me. I'm all about the character of an item. So in a nutshell what I guess this letter is trying to say is thank you Macklemore for the cool song.