Earlier this 12 months, I used to be thumbing by way of Fb Market once I got here throughout a “hearth piano” on the market. I clicked the itemizing anticipating that “hearth” meant “cool,” however discovered one thing way more literal: a pyrotechnic piano, MacGyvered to spit flames from its high every time a participant tickled the keys.
Within the temporary description that accompanied the submit, the California-based vendor recounted how he had been hand-building the piece till “an harm took him out of the store.” He was now asking $2,000 for the piano, which he thought-about 90 % full. That this artist was thwarted from realizing his freaky imaginative and prescient left me each astonished and surprisingly melancholy. I spent the remainder of that evening questioning if he grew up tinkering with pianos, and if he missed the method of constructing them. For a second I even thought-about asking him what this outstanding piece would appear like if he’d seen it by way of.
I’ve been parsing different folks’s wares since earlier than Fb Market debuted in 2016. I typically enterprise to Los Angeles flea markets, thrift retailers and swap meets tucked away in highschool parking heaps, drive-in film theaters and enigmatic storefronts. I’ll cease by property gross sales on weekends to comb by way of issues like chess-piece-molding kits from the Nineteen Seventies and miniature cocktail shakers. I’m extra drawn to the aura surrounding these objects, and the tales I think about they may inform, than I’m the objects themselves. A day spent roaming an property sale nurtures my curiosity in regards to the objects that make a life, what retains significance as time sparkles by and what folks select to let go of as their environment change they usually do, too.
The same impulse took me to Fb Market, but to name it a digital thrift store underplays how distinctive and weird the platform is. Fb correct isn’t the very best prism by way of which to think about somebody’s existence, however its Market software nonetheless yields surprises relatively than serving up — or, not less than, solely serving up — algorithmic slop. It offers me with the tales I can think about solely once I’m looking by way of retailers. Market is distinct in that these oddities aren’t sometimes divorced from their contexts: The sellers’ descriptions can vary from explaining, say, what introduced 68 pairs of salt and pepper shakers into their lives, or why they have been parting with an motion determine of a random jacked man (the vendor apparently thought the toy was Dwayne [the Rock] Johnson when he purchased it).
The ephemera populating Fb Market has reworked a nook of the community right into a locus of awe, maybe even delight. On this method, my behavior of scrolling by way of Fb Market isn’t simply an enhancement of the in-person thrifting expertise. To gaze upon its elementary weirdness is nearly a type of time journey, a callback to the whimsy that outlined the Internet 1.0 period. These quirky choices are the kinds of belongings you would anticipate from a spot like Stumbleupon — a bygone website from the web of yore that includes a button that, when clicked, took you to a random web site. The objects on Fb Market are jumbled in so haphazardly that they remind me of the lawless tumble of photos that graced GeoCities’ pages.
As a millennial who recollects how enjoyable the nascent web could possibly be, it’s a aid to search out one thing that feels paying homage to that point. It serves me such unusual juxtapositions as a surprising midcentury amber glass “swag lamp” to right away comply with a “distinctive pockets” that includes pleather wrinkles forming a terrifying face. This anarchic show is like gazing into somebody’s hallway closet rammed with tchotchkes they couldn’t discover one other place for. It’s exactly the place slivers of humanity emerge.
In a single itemizing, a vendor was eliminating stylish lamps, couches, lounge chairs and a eating desk amid an ongoing divorce. Within the caption he defined needing to “promote all the things off and cut up the proceeds.” “All objects are in nice form and have been properly taken care of,” he went on. “Be variety, it’s been laborious.” One other itemizing, that includes a baseball cap emblazoned with the phrases “Shit Present Supervisor,” was described as a present from the vendor’s son: “Single parenting at its most interesting.” (As if to push back any miserable implications, he reassured potential patrons that the hat was a enjoyable one.) Listings like these have made me take into account how objects can change into charged with reminiscences we cherish, nonetheless tough they have been on the time we have been experiencing them; and the way giving up these objects can really feel like mourning components of ourselves that we’re pressured to dilute or go away behind.
By staring into this cupboard of chaos, I’ve realized in regards to the weird objects that make up a life. I’ve tumbled down the rabbit gap of out of date furnishings, like gossip chairs. However these dives have principally made me sit with the fact that, due to restricted cash or house, or private disagreements, we should typically hand over issues we cherish — however these objects’ significance can not less than be handed on to another person.
I’ve ended up shopping for simply two objects from Fb Market: a marble espresso desk and a luxurious recliner. However buying objects there may be virtually irrelevant. It seems that I don’t actually need to purchase a cheeseburger-shaped lamp. I do, nonetheless, need to know in regards to the lifetime of the one that, at one level, couldn’t stay with out that lamp.
