As you could probably imagine my sleep patterns are all shot to hell. I don’t have a routine in place at all. Somehow I was able to wake up fully motivated at 7:30 this morning. 7:30 on a Saturday morning can lead to only one good thing. Flea Marketing.

I really only enjoy flea marketing for one reason. Trying to finish off my collection of original Nintendo video games. Everything else at a flea market is typically junk. There might be one or two things that might throw a shimmer in my eyes. But not usually.

As I begin walking I notice an empty booth displaying a might fine comic collection. I stop for a minute to take a gander but there are no prices on anything, my comic collecting days are over and I’m not really looking for anything in particular. But out of nowhere comes a goober to talk me.

This is Weatherby 2.0 so I will entertain the conversation with a smile. But it soon turns into a sausage measuring contest for this guy and there is only one participant, him. He loved going on and on about his collection and how mint it was. And as I’m walking away, probably 10 feet from the booth or so, he catches up to me and reels me back in. Jesus man, I don’t care bro. Apperently he’s filming a TV show about comic book collecting and will be shooting it in the local comic book shop. There’s already some show like that with Kevin Smith on A&E I believe. But of course, his show is going to be better. To be fair though, I’m probably the only person that will stop at his booth all morning so he was like a dog waiting on its master to come home at the end of the day I suppose.

Finally, I manage to escape the clutches of evil comic book guy and I start to notice a trend. There’s like a bagillion cigar shops in the flea market. Now I know this is Cigar City but comeon, in a flea market, really? I suppose its a cheap product to be produced and easy to sell. Like Avon. I guess its the Avon for men.

Flea markets have changed a lot in my day and age. Like it doesn’t feel like a flea market anymore. Half the items are pieces of plastic made in Vietnam. Everything feels like it was pieces of shit bought in bulk off of an infomercial. Hell, what happened to the days where you could get good quality shit? I don’t think I saw one skillet all morning.

One big difference I noticed from a Kentucky flea market is the lack of guns for sell. There must be some sort of more strict gun control laws here. At a Kentucky flea market a man can make a killing picking up some good deals on some paperless pistols. No such luck at a Florida flea market. I saw some samurai blades though, in case anyone wants to act out Lord of the Rings.

I did manage to find some booths with NES games. I like to think about my purchases before I act on impulse so I walked around after I found a couple of games missing from my collection. The guy told me they were six and four dollars. But when I came back to make my purchase he tried to get me for fifteen. And one of them had a ripped label. Then he tried to haggle down to twelve but it was too late and I had already been insulted. I walked away. A nice old man with some NES games at another booth offered to come down on his prices for me. I went with him.