Item:

A sheet of glass, about the size of a piece of A4 paper, with some pressboard backing material.

Why It’s Here:

Once you’ve torn out the daguerreotype of your great-great-grandmother’s wedding day and used it as rolling paper, you don’t really need the frame anymore.

Probable Recipient:

Somebody who is out of green but has too many dang daguerreotype’s laying around beggin’ for framin’.

Who can spell daguerreotype, anyway?

I had to look it up like three times. And I have no idea how to pronounce it. At some point I’ll be put on the spot and I’ll be stuck either Elmer Fudding it into the ground or just shouting “DOGGERTYPE!!!” and punching someone in the face to change the subject.

Item:

A brown cardboard box labelled “spagetti maker”, with what looked like it could be a spaghetti maker inside.

Why It’s Here:

Have you ever been to a grocery store?  They have a pasta section.  You can buy spaghetti.  For like a buck.  And then you just go home and boil water.  It’s a modern goddam miracle of convenience—and on a tired-out evening, when you just want to kick back with some pasta and an episode of Antiques Roadshow, hauling out the Spagetti Maker starts to sound like a lot of work.  Crazy talk.  Nutso.  It’s like handwashing your underwear, not because the washer is on the blink, but just for fun.

A spaghetti maker is like touching dirty underwear, is what I’m saying.

Probable Recipient:

A panty-raider with tremendously bad eyesight.

I want to mock the spelling of ’spagetti’:

But it gets like 1.5M google hits to the 5M for ’spaghetti’, so it must be a pretty common variant.  So instead, I’m just going to suggest that people start using “rhavioli” to even things out a bit.

Item:

The base of a Kenmore 5-speed blender.  No glass pitcher included.

Why It’s Here:

Resident has recently discovered organic-friendly grocery store Whole Foods, is taking the name way too literally.

Probable Recipient:

Prince Charming, who has been all these long nights coveting the glass pitcher discarded in flight by the emotionally unstable but incontestably hawt belle of the ball.  Having fit that glass vessel into its rightful and destined place, he will make a smoothie.  Of love.

You know what Disney needs:

More blenders.  Beauty and the Beast had all this anthropomorphic furniture, sure, yay, awesome, but I don’t remember seeing a blender.  Shameful.  Makes you wonder if old Walt was an anti-Blendite.

“Kenmore”, he would shriek at some cringing young animator’s suggestion, letting backhand fly, spilling inkwells across drawing tables.  “Kenmore?  How about Ken less!  How about Ken not a chance in hell!”

Welcome back, you weird little bastard.

Item:

A hand-painted sign that says “TiKi BAR” in yellow paint.  There’s black fabric piping around the edges of the words.

Why It’s Here:

The tiki bar closed down. 

Probable Recipient:

Whoever re-opens the tiki bar. 

Why did the tiki bar cross the tiki bar?

To get to the other tiki bar.

Item:

A folding table (I guess) with a diamond-shape blue/green/yellow pattern on top.

Why It’s Here:

To flush out the epileptics?  That tabletop pattern is seriously loud.  It’s all like HELLO THERE I AM A TABLE LOOK AT ME AAAAARRRRGGG TABLE TABLE TABLE.

Probable Recipient:

Someone with poor hearing.

LA LA LA LOOKIT ME:

TABLE TABLE TABLE TABLE

Item:

A bamboo plant in a small glass rectangular vase.

Why It’s Here:

Pardon some philosophizing, but bamboo makes me all zen and thoughtful:

The “why it’s here” portion of these writeups is a curious beast.  While those words can be seen as a simple prompt for explanation—how did this thing arrive at this location?—there is a more charged, and in many cases more likely meaning:

“What is wrong with this?”

For something to have arrived at this table, it stands to reason that someone in the building held the thing in their hands and thought, “I do not want this.”  The act of putting something into the swapmeet is unavoidably also the act of rejection.

And yet, the object so rejected is considered to have value.  Perhaps only theoretical value, true—by putting a thing on the table, the prior owner is not necessarily saying “someone will want this”; they may only be saying “someone might want this”, with an explict or tacit coda:  “…though god knows why they would.”

And so the question of “why it’s here” acts as a sort of dark, unloving yin to the “probable recipient” yang, complementary meditations on the desirable and the undesirable.  Partners in an acknowledgement of the possibility of an object being simultaneously valueless and valuable, disposable and utile, trash and treasure.

The laundryroom swapmeet, then becomes a sort of nexus of ownership, a still, quiet eye in the existential storm.  A wormhole, if you will, through which possessions may travel from illfitting owners to those who can better love them.

So why is this bamboo plant here?  It is here because this is where it was put.  It is here because this is where things go.  It is here because it must stop here, however briefly, if it is to make the journey from the place Where It Was to the place Where It Should Be.

And it is here because the fucking thing makes anyone who looks at it go into a zen trance and go on for paragraphs at a time.  It’s goddam voodoo, man!  Stay away!

Probable Recipient:

A yuppie.  Yuppies love bamboo.  I read it in a magazine. 

And now, your moment of zen:

[sound of Josh being sued into paste by The Daily Show's law team]

Item:

A broken Stella Artois glass in a big cardboard box.

Why It’s Here:

What?  What do you—are you saying that, that—

Seriously, isn’t this the trashcan?  It looks just like the trashcan.  What with the washers and dryers and the mailboxes and the folding table and the being-an-entire-goddam-room.

And get off my lawn!

Probable Recipient:

Someone with some crazy glue and a lot of free time.

Self-restraint:

Is the only thing standing between you and the dozen or so terrible jokes I could make about how that glass is not looking so stella, &c.

Item:

A 500-piece jigsaw puzzle called C is for Chocolate, from “The Alphabet Murder Puzzle Series”.

Why It’s Here:

Previous owner found out that the butler did it.  Or maybe they were constantly grossed out by that picture of a bloody cake.

Probable Recipient:

Someone who really enjoyed “A is for Air Rifle” and “B is for Botulism”.  

Murder puzzles:

There’s a phrase that has so much more potential than what has been realized here.  Murder puzzle!  That would be a fantastic low-budget horror flick.  A cursed puzzle that kills anyone that finishes it!

Of course, the ending would be pretty anticlimactic—the protagonist figures out there are like three pieces missing.  But that’d be the perfect setup for the sequel: the final shot of the film is his young son finding the missing pieces under the couch, and looking curiously at the cardtable where the unfinished puzzle sits…and roll credits! 

There could be a whole franchise! 

“Murder Puzzle II: Edge Pieces”

“Murder Puzzle VI: Bloody Jigsaw”

“Murder puzzle XII: Back To The Card Table”

Item:

A black strap of some sort, about a foot long, with “LIVE in LOVE” in white stitching.

Why It’s Here:

Bitter keepsake of a collapsed BDSM relationship, maybe?  It looks like it could be a choker.  Or, more to the point, a collar.

Probable Recipient:

Someone who is hankerin’ for a spankerin’. 

There was this punk girl:

I knew her only as a general acquaintance, in high school—I can’t remember her name at all.  But she was a tall, dark haired girl with very fair skin, quite pretty, sort of quiet.  Wore black pleather and safetypins and died bits of her hair various colors at times.  Hot Topic shopper, as a lot of girls were, but she wore it well and added her own accessories.

And it came up one day, in a conversation on the MAX, that she was Christian.  And a friend of mind—a good, smart, likeable nerd who was only occasionally totally obnoxious—pointed out how totally weird and unexpected that was.  Because she was, like, totally punked out.  And, uh, you know, that’s, uh.  Weird.  Um.

That’s more or less a direct recreation of his argument, anyway.  I was struck at the time that someone as smart as him could draw such a weird false dichotomy.  But he’s always been a bit abrasive toward organized religion.  Go figure.

I just remembered that.