The Yard Sale

Pharoah Sanders has a song/album titled "The Creator Has A Master Plan." That is debatable, of course. But regardless of that, I love that title. And I love it when he sings that refrain over and over, before howling over drums and wind instruments like an African yodeler, in some kind of crazy ass transcendental movement of either pure virtuosity, or self-conscious catharsis a la John Coltrane (who was terribly self-conscious, until he wasn't, which was his point, but since he proved it, no one else in his genre can re-prove it, exactly, which is why I'm saying that basically Jazz went as far as it could go with him, which is also saying a lot, but anyway).

We're having a big yard sale tomorrow. Our hope is that we can generate enough funds to repair the malfunctioning rocket thruster on our ship and finally return to our home planet at the farthest edge of our solar system...Either that or take some of the sting out of the next U-Haul rental awaiting us in July.

Yard sales are a lot of work. A lot of appraising, sorting, moving, arranging, bartering, and dealing with the public, who doesn't care what that little set of plastic bracelets might have meant to you once upon a time. They're totally redemptive too, though. By that I mean that it's nice to see people driving away with your stuff. "Farewell, old friend," you might even want to say to your Speak n' Spell, "May you enrich more lives!" And then there's the groovy fact that you got a buck for it, which is almost a whole 1/3 of a gallon of gas for your car.

So tomorrow before I go in to work, we're getting up at the crack of dawn to arrange things on the lawn, drink coffee, and watch our possessions become grist for the mill. The by-product will be a few bucks here and there. And that's cool. I'll take it...because I got my first Tomato Fryer paycheck today and it's pretty g.d. depressing. Luckily I had a packet waiting on me from the U of Iowa Rhetoric Department when I got home. It helped remind me why I'm working so hard for so little in return at the moment...because there's a Master Plan, that's why.