NSFW: Executor of the Estate

First, a few definitions...

Garage/Yard Sale: almost always hosted and attended by middle- to lower-class families, either socioeconomically-speaking or level-of-refinement-speaking, these fun events are a chance to offload all the junk around your house to early-rising-on-the-weekend strangers who will haggle with you over 50 cents-worth of McDonald's Kid's Meals toys and smirk haughtily at your collection of beer-themed bar mirrors that your significant other is forcing you to sell, causing you to tell her that yes, that bike works perfectly, secretly knowing that the instant she climbs on it the devil bike will suck her pantleg into its chain and then the handlebars will wrench to the left uncontrollably and she will crash, hopefully into a a cactus.

Estate Sale: a chance to dig through all the earthly belongings of some dead person whose vulture-like family has already claimed everything good.

Which do I prefer? Well, they both have their merits, but typically I'm more of a garage sale fan, if for no other reason than their garages don't smell like death. Usually. However, as we waited to take possession of our new house, we visited a lot of estate sales, hoping to score some furniture. With the exception of one desk that was very nice and very cheap (but required disassembly and a long trip up a winding hall and and stair...not to mention we didn't need a desk), most everything was as old as the person who had just died, and thus not of interest. Then one day we hit the motherload. Not in terms of things we would like to buy, but in terms of THE MOST AWESOMELY CREEPY ESTATE SALE EVER. Yes, dear readers, the few pictures I covertly snapped do not begin to describe the awkward hilarity we were faced with from the instant we stepped inside...

But first, let me set the stage. We pull up and see a street lined with cars--people flooding in and out. It's an older home, but in a nice neighborhood, and decently maintained. We walk up the steps and through the door, and see a kindly 80+ year old woman manning a checkout desk. Then we look directly behind her and see a large cardboard box with a bright yellow sign on it:


Yes, you read that right. It says, "Porno $5.00 each". Muffling our adolescent giggles our eyes darted around the room looking for something, anything else, to distract us...and we saw these:

They're like a Bob & Cha Cha mug if it came from Fascinations! And, as Corey loves to point out, you can drink out of the nipple--it has a little hole in it. Even more awesome is that they are sitting next to figurines of praying children... Desperate to escape from the room o' porn being staffed by the grandmotherly type, I raced down the hall and ducked into what turned out to be a bathroom:

The embarrassment quickly became a sqwicky unease as I looked around and saw that they were literally selling EVERYTHING, including his prescription medication (25 cents a bottle!) and miscellaneous small utensils both ancient and somewhere between barely and not-at-all functioning (displayed on a card table half in and half out of the bathtub, for your...convenience?). Not clear was whether or not the mirror hung in the shower with a bandaid (resourceful? tacky? you decide...) was for sale, because I think it was the only unmarked item in the house.

At this point, it became much harder to take photos without being seen by the swarms of people who somehow all found out about this sale. Thus, there are few other photos. We also saw canned food from 1976 (for a half-assed bomb shelter), several firefighter's suits (Corey wanted one for Halloween 2009 but that would mean wearing something that came out of this house, and that certainly wasn't going to happen), a large gun rack (obviously!), the tiniest shower I have ever seen (inside an unfinished part of the basement that had no door, but since you wouldn't be able to lift your hands over your head to shampoo in that tiny thing anyway, probably not much worry of someone entering that room during your 12-second shower), an orange velvet sofa, and lots of playboy calendars.

Upon exiting the house we all shuddered involuntarily, as if our bodies were trying to shake off the stale air of the late, lonely, old man's house. We supressed our mirth as best we could until we made it into the car, and then all our pent-up laughter burst out as we watched a woman roll up her car window, suffocating her yippy dog, whose head had been stuck out of it. Just then, someone rolled up in a truck with a trailer and strode into the house, obviously ready to take home some large "treasure" he had found inside. I'm hoping it was the orange velvet couch and the entire box o' porn...