There’s OCD & hoarders aplenty in my large fam. Therefore outrage that many times in my life I’ve up & sold my possessions. The nerve! Some were especially flabbergasted when I sold a ‘family heirloom’ to raise funds to travel across Europe after quitting my job. This was no true antique, merely a dark-stained wood frame with a metal-plated ornate center depicting a holly motif. I put a tiny 2″ X 3″ painting of cigarette butts I’d done, surrounded by an absurdly enormous matte to fit the large frame. Which I thought was hilarious, as did my ex-boss who bought it. Incidentally, he hired me back upon returning from my travels. It was an on-again/off-again employment, the kind that happens with people like me who chafe at authority.

My rummage sales in the once-sleepy city of Seattle always left me pretty flush with unexpected cash. Not because I had great stuff. Mostly my wares were used, & not necessarily gently. But they were often unusual in some way. I’ve always had eclectic tastes when it comes to junk. My success came down to the fact that I priced items low enough for them to grow legs & strike out on their own. If I didn’t want it, it couldn’t be worth much. Frankly, I was tired of looking at whatever it was & couldn’t stand the thought of schlepping it to yet another abode. So insult the thing with such a low cost that it slinks away with someone else, someone who’d be overjoyed at their good find & love this new piece of jetsam more than I.

There was a 2nd hand/vintage shop in my Capitol Hill neighborhood called That’s Atomic, named for the era of all the merch. A guy that worked there was nice & funny, so my sister & I would frequent the store for something to do on uneventful days. Largely most days were uneventful. We were in our 20s, so that’s easily explained. We would stroll the tiny store & literally everything we’d show interest in the nice/funny guy would pipe up with “Oh, that’s broken. You can have it for half.” The name of the store became That’s Broken ever after.

“Du! Wanna go to That’s Broken & see if they still have that freaky lamp with the cracked red shade?” I’d say. My sister’s name is Julie, but to me she’s Du. To her I’m Ky, courtesy of our nephews’ when they were too young to pronounce our names. A lot of my material possessions were attained from places like this, or even lower-rent places. Or on the side of the road. Oddly, I had a knack for reselling my cast-offs. I even sold a wonky Dr. Suessian table I made out of scrap plywood, with wavy legs & uneven oval top & lower surfaces. I painted it green & purple. Maybe that was a selling factor?

Would that selling my paintings were as easy as my rummage sales. That would probably be the case if I was staring at them every day or had to move them from place to place. But I put them in storage, where they retain that magical worth to me of things I never see. Also I’m too disorganized & broke to frame them & set up showings. Easy distraction makes for lack of ambition, truth be told.

Like any kid of my time, I was a cowpoke at heart. Here I am around 3 yrs old, riding my springy horse. A while later, say age 4 or 5, I graduated to a stick horse. Another appaloosa. I favor B&W to this day. My mother Muz, as I called her (a nickname that also stuck), was an avid reader. Though I wasn’t particularly brilliant, I started to pick up reading before I was in Kindergarten. I had yet to really grasp the meanings of stuff I read, so I would attribute my own.

On a Sunday drive at this time– because that’s what we did, the whole fam-damily piled into the Chevy station wagon to toodle around wasting fossil fuel– we drove by a pasture with a lone horse. There was a sign tacked to the fence. It was unclear whether the sign referred to the property or the horse. To my 5 yr old mind it meant something completely original. My stick horse thenceforth went by the name For Sale.