Items most recently purchased at the Goodwill on Smoky Park Highway:
1 standard series video cable and 1 set of standard series AV cables including left/right audio and video. Last week I got a free TV from a colleague who was giving it away. "My partner asked if I knew of a museum I could donate it to." It's an old 27" Sony with a brick of a picture tube. It weighs about 80 pounds. I neither have nor want cable, dish, or a signal converter box. I do, however, have an ancient DVD/VHS player and a handful of movies and shows in both formats, including a VHS copy of the original Star Wars trilogy, as yet un-fucked-up by George Lucas's misadventures in CGI. Of course, to hook this player up I needed the right cables, and just a month or two back I'd donated a box full of electronic accessories, including several such cables, to that very same Goodwill.
1 Joan Osborne CD (Relish). Just a few days previous I'd been talking with my friend about Joan Osborne. We were listening to her wail along with the Holmes Brothers. "Some of her bluesy stuff is beautiful," my friend said. I always love how she uses the word "beautiful". She uses it as a catchall positive word, always strongly accented: "That sunset is beautiful." "This pad thai is beautiful." "The smell of wisteria is beautiful."
14 pieces of solid Hamilton flatware. In the separation my wife claimed the good silver, and rightly so: she'd had it since before we'd been together. It was plain but solid and pleasant. Well-balanced. I was left with a mismatched assortment of flatware, a few from this set, a few more from that. Most painfully I felt the absence of any good-sized spoons. I like a good scoop of soup. What I've got is functional, but not particularly flashy, and I've taken to scrounging in the silver every time I make it to Goodwill. A few trips back I found 6 forks and 8 spoons, all from the same set. They've got heavy knobby handles and good heft. The spoons are generous. I like them a lot. Each time I've gone back since this find I've looked for matching knives, but no luck yet.
1 men's shirt, button-down. It's got a close cross-hatched print in green and brown and goes well with the khaki shorts I like to wear. I didn't notice until I first put it on in the changing room that a bright orange band runs all along the bottom hem, an incongruous gaud adding flair and ostentation. A good pick for bowling nights.
1 baseball-style cap with camo print. We were going tubing on the river that afternoon, and I wanted to get something to keep the sun off my scalp. It's an ad for a local outdoors store. "Spud and Deb's Dog Hunting Supplies" it reads, I think, as little sense as that makes. Maybe it's "Spud and Deb's Hunting Dog Supplies"? Hard to say: the text is broken up by a clip-art quality rendering of a hunting dog, some sort of tricolor hound, making the syntax hard to follow, like the acrostic crosses you'll sometimes find outside of rural churches. In any case, it's not the sort of thing you'd think I'd wear in public. With its ironic donning I took one step closer to true hipsterdom.