I am not the prescriptive grammar type.

Obvious to anyone who's ever read anything I've written, but antique when used as a verb bugs me. AnTEEKing. The very nice lady at the very cluttered consignment shop asked me if I was anTEEKing. Also, she wondered if I was an anTEEKer.

A resounding "No" on both. "I'm just browsing," I told her. "I am a browser."

I got a really cool oil lamp with a red dome for FIVE BUCKS. Awesome. I have a real thing for oil lamps and lanterns and candles (unscented). Any kind of firelight. My Grandma Bonnie used to collect oil lamps and she had dozens. One time when I was a kid, she lit them all up at the same time and I loved it. The glow, the intimacy. How it seemed to have made a truce with the darkness it could not totally defeat.

I only have four oil lamps now. I despise material things, so could never have dozens. The more stuff you have, the more it ceases to be stuff and turns into shit. As in, "All this shit."

Whenever I am in a consignment shop, I wonder about the 8-track tapes. They're always dusty and forgotten. Nobody, but nobody, is gonna buy them. They always look so lonely to me. There was a stack today at the consignment shop, six or eight of them. Dusty. Forgotten. One was an Eagles album. Perhaps, I thought, around 2050 they will be collector's items. Right now, though, in 2012 they are garbage.

I also went to the Good Will and bought a Giorgio Armani suede blazer for FOUR BUCKS. I was looking for some sort of maroon pants. I got up this morning wishing I had maroon pants and that's why I left the house and went to all these places. Maroon pants. A darker red. Something. Wool, or some sort of heavy fabric. I had it all in my mind, but didn't see it. There was some pretty nifty purple pants, but they were 36 waist. Too big. I need a 34. At that point I realized I would never find maroon pants that were precisely 34 waist, so stopped looking.

Now I'm going to drink some beer and do my dishes. See ya.