Don't Take Your Gloves To Town

As if to make a point, my computer has been giving me a lot of trouble the last few days. Proving how indispensable it is to me - I think between the two of us we share one brain.

Giving up on the computer for a while gave me a chance to start getting my stuff together for the flea market I'm selling at on Sunday. I started out with a huge pile of clothes and shoes, but if I keep "organizing" much longer there won't be much left to sell.

Lots of my clothes haven't fit in over two years - those have to go. There are some I have no problem getting rid of: any clothes I bought and wore for temping. Also some black clothes hastily purchased to wear to my mother's funeral a few years back - as if I ever needed more black clothes, but it felt like it wasn't respectful enough to wear a skirt or top I'd played a gig or gone grocery shopping in. Items from Target or H&M, usually a cheap pick-me-up that briefly served its purpose and then made me feel kind of worse - those can definitely go.

There are some things I'm incapable of parting with: purses - I have dozens, even though I tend to drag around the same tired messenger bag everywhere. Each cute purse is a potential other life where I'm daintily pulling a compact out of a tiny beaded handbag instead of heaving a janitor-worthy set of keys, water bottles, notebooks, set lists and trail mix around; hats, same thing - all the possibilities to become someone else; scarves - even if I hate the colors and have no intention of ever doing anything with them but looking at them next to each other, it's like a miniaturized amalgamation of every thrift shop I've ever been in, there in the scarf drawer.

I can't even think of selling the odd unwearable vintage clothes I've been carrying around forever - a skirt sewn to look like an entire roulette wheel with felt numbers around the hem and a sequined ball pinned on, a floor-length white raincoat with big black buttons, a 50's white leather jacket embroidered with silver, a black lamé pantsuit from the late 60's worth keeping even for the label - "MicMac St. Tropez" in bright green thread on royal blue...A 70's grey Western suit jacket, 100% polyester but incredibly well-cut by that master of tailoring Kenny Rogers, either before or after his chicken restaurant failed.

It's a good thing I wasn't here when the vide grenier woman returned my call to book a space - they do it by metre and I thought a metre was comparable to a foot so I was going to ask for five. A metre's actually closer to a yard. Eric told her two, but if I keep subtracting stuff that's still going to be too much.