only sing along to Hank Williams when you are DEFINITELY alone.

....so then I had to walk down the street, past couples on dates and girls in heels and diners eating al fresco, carrying a fucking plunger. you know who wants to see that? no one. 

this was at value village, exactly like so. there's writing over the center photo but it seems to be for the frame itself, not for the pictures within. this is one of those deliciously awful discoveries I tend to specifically seek out: the personal photographs tossed into thrift-store piles. it's so fucking tragic! >1970s ones are the best for this; they're not romantic and antique. they're of people who are most likely still alive, possibly even local. 

some close-ups: 

do you know these people? this family torn asunder? 

B.C. in the C.D. I just made that up. 

another filter of my sexy, mysterious tower friends. I used to live kitty-corner; now I'm two blocks away. my radio reception sucks less now. 

I passed on this purchase. 

*

hey! I took some photos of the fucked-up estate sale! 

no one I asked knew how old the house actually was. my guess: ~1908. it smelled of piss and stagnation, like whomever lived (and lived and lived) there spent the past decade sitting inertly in a stained chair, staring at the filthy walls, while feral cats crawled in through random windows and fornicated in the corners. 

I mean, for Christ's sake, this is the fucking bathroom. i expected a cloud of satan-flies to suddenly swarm in. 

the worst part was realizing that someone really did live here. were they totally alone when they died? did anyone ever check on them? alone in this nightmarish house all day, what did they think about? it's half a block from where I work, although admittedly in the opposite direction from how I always get there, but I'd never even noticed the place before. it's so grotesque to root through someone's shit after they die when you had no idea of their existence while they were alive. 

...all this self-reflective guilt aside, I fucking love estate sales. 

inside a closet. 

wallpaper. 

the way the pattern on the linoleum eroded. 

you know those sinister photos from the 50s of people dressed up as horrifying Easter bunnies, holding crying children?for some reason this chair reminded me of those. 

don't open the oven. 

a window in the living room, sorry, parlor. it's a huge, gorgeous house that's in such depressing disrepair that it's likely to be razed. maybe someone will put more fucking Apodments on the lot. that'd be super. 

and amid all the disarray, a Hawai'i-shaped Don Ho. 

*

"from the back, the buffalo's scrotum swings jauntily to the side, as though the animal were barreling through the grassland, and as his tail is raised the anus is clearly visible, as crisp and articulated as the straw insert on a thirty-two ounce Big Gulp lid."*

-Dave Madden, 'The Authentic Animal'

*...I think this is one of my new most favorite sentences ever.