Category Archives: More Interesting than the Most Interesting Man in the World

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.

It was about 8:30 AM. I was at the end of a Romeo and Juliet and the bottom of a bottle of Basil Hayden when I found myself. At a time when smoking ashes and masturbation have both lost their fun I watched the sun rise and my spirits rise with it. They say it takes about 3 weeks of vacation time to truly unwind from the stresses of everyday work. I can now vouch for this statement as I have been unemployed for three weeks.

The three week vacation is a luxury most Americans will never meet in this high paced society we live in but it is truly a mind unraveling experience that we should envy the Europeans of. The first week your too exhausted to do anything. The second week your unaccustomed to the freedoms you now possess so you party party party. Beginning the third week your body requires rest from the extraneous amounts of partying. Once recovered you find yourself. And you find motivation again.

At least that’s how it happened for me. It just so happened that these three weeks lined up with my move to Florida like the rare phenomenon when all nine eight planets in the solar system line up. For some reason I choose to work right up until my move to Florida. And with work I never truly had a vacation as I was still doing work on my days off. It leaves the spirits quite low.

But now that I’ve seen the bottom of every bottle in the liquor cabinet and had the free reign to sleep until 4 PM in the afternoon for three weeks I’ve grown quite bored with myself. I know my funds are limited and like a ticking time bomb waiting to expire so I mounted myself up for the ever pending job hunt i must perform. When I found myself, I didn’t know where I was going with my life, but I found where I wanted to be. I must have lost sight of it. I don’t know exactly how I want to get there but I have learned that I want to take my time.

So in the meantime like spacehog, I decided I would look for a temp job. Maybe Best Buy, Barnes and Noble or Lowes or something. So I fixed a pot of coffee and readied myself for the day. Drove across the beautiful Howard Franklin Bridge and started hunting.

The funny thing about job hunting for a temp job today is that its not like it was when I was in high school. You can’t just go into a store and ask for a hard copy of an application. The chick behind the desk at Best Buy told me I needed to go online and check out Best Buy’s career page. “Lame” I offered as a friendly comment to show her I acknowledged her statement.

And what do I get in a response from the girl? In a smart ass tone she replied “And by lame you mean the way of the future.” My god what have we (Gen X) done? What have we created? This girl probably has no idea what the world was like before the internet hand fed her every little thing in life she will ever need. I couldn’t keep my cool with her tone. “Actually I like having a hard copy in front of the manager’s face so he will know I made the effort to come in the store and talk to someone instead of being one of hundreds of stat sheets on a computer that will probably never get called back.”

I thought I would try my chances at the used record shop in St. Pete after this. After all, I had worked at a record store before. So I ask the manager if she had any job openings or an application to fill out. No, she said. So I asked if she had an application I could leave with her. Actually I dont take applications. I dont have any openings and just so many people ask for jobs here. I had a dumbfound look on my face. How could a business not take applications? I had anticipated the fact that she probably was asked this question a lot. Hell, we were asked that a lot too at my previous record shop. That’s why I left an application with them and they called me back when they had an opening. How could she possibly expect to pull a good applicant for a position if she takes no applications. I don’t mean to sound bitter but if she just waits until she is understaffed to hire the next random person for a position she could get any kind of rift raft. I understand its just a used record shop but come on, its business. But hey, thats probably why shes running a record store.

Maybe my failed attempts to find a temp job are a sign that I should just hold out and search for a real big boy job. Who know’s. But you have to stay head strong and not  give up. And at least in the mean time I have rediscovered my drive to write some more.