Out in the street in front of our drive was a sawhorse festooned with a garish sign and, get this, a festive baby blue helium balloon dancing playfully in the air.
My wife knows how to throw a party.
“A balloon,” I said. “Where the hell did you get a helium balloon?”
“At the dollar store.”
“Huh. How much did it cost?”
Dripping with more sweat than Mike Rowe driving a Ford Truck, I had just muscled tons of our most useless crap out on the front lawn. My normally well-oiled brain wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders.
Weird how it was that moment the heavens decided to deluge our asses and stuff. I welled up with despair as I watched the rain beating down against that little helium balloon. I’m proud to say it didn’t fight back much. Soon it lay there, on the ground, like a fresh chunk of roadkill.
It wasn’t a winner, but I knew how to handle that. I dashed out in the rain and pinned it with a “participant” ribbon taken from my trophy collection. It popped and was gone for good.
Our “yard sale” was officially underway.
Here’s a little treat for those of you psycho enough to make the jump.
Let fp equal the amount of force per yard sale profits.
For example, if items for sale on the front lawn weigh 42 tons and those items have been moved 42 times (each) without being useful in any way, shape or form during the last 20 years, let us assume that f equals 4.2 trillion megajoules of force. (That’s the energy required to lug that shit around.)
Further, let us assume that the yard sale was a dismal failure so p (profit) is actually a negative number. (This is profit adjusted for things like fees, signage, balloons, labor, mental health and a substantial quantity of horse tranquilizers.) For our purposes we’ll round it up to zero.
That’s all the data we need. fp = f divided by p.
Since divide by zero is undefined, we conclude that fp must equal “infinity.”
By the way, another way of expressing fp is with the term “pain.”
Now you know how the yard sale went. Infinite pain geometrically proven.
Days later and that crap is still in our yard. Last night it rained like you wouldn’t believe. Do you happen to know anyone in the market for post-industrial petrified eclectic furniture?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF1CYC6L-2E]
Shouts from the Abyss 
We tried to have a yard sale once in our City house and the first people to show up were some boorish Bosnian people who couldn’t have been any ruder to my wife. I wanted no part of her yard sale, but I had to go outside and threaten to murder them if they didn’t leave my property immediately after I thought I heard “stupid woman” muttered by one of the degenerates. It went downhill from there. Our lovely suburban neighborhood does a neighborhood wide one and for some reason we always participate even though we know better. Garage salers are a unique breed of people, lets just leave it at that.
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Yeah, I worried about that, too. Like the people who show up an hour early looking for screaming deals on firearms.
The parade of folks was actually fascinating. Most were really nice. Some whipped open their wallets and willing paid our more than fair prices. Others wanted to haggle down from a quarter to a nickel for a friggin’ used paperback.
We actually met a surprising number of really nice people that I wouldn’t even mind getting to know. Watching them leave and knowing I’d never see them again was a lot like the last day of summer camp.
Overall, though, it was a day dedicated exclusively to pain. I didn’t allow a few moments of normality to tarnish my feelings about that.
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Christ. Next you’ll be telling us you visited a MALL!
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Since moving to the big city I have, so far, successfully avoided malls and Starbucks, both securely located on my personal boycott list.
I’ll promise this much: If I do visit a mall I will blog about it before killing myself.
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I applaud your in-depth use of mathematics to prove your pain. Yard sales creep me out, but not as much as the people that go to them.
After we moved to The Aerie, the Beloved and I had a Garage Sale (not having much of a yard), I think we sold one lamp and one old set of speakers. That was a good six hours spent.
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The reality of yard sales is that it is always more efficient to just kill yourself. The other way is a lot more work, pain, humiliation, and still arrives at the same destination.
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