America for Sale: UnpluggedHow much for this?by Ian Shoales While bin diving at garage sales (purely as an observer, you understand), I've noticed cassette tapes of Brit rockers Depeche Mode showing up with a strange regularity. And that's not all. Split Enz, The Cure, and The Fall — the entire pop catalog of the 1980s is inching its way out of American homes and into the dustbin of history, or at least into other American homes willing to spend 50 cents per cassette. Count Me InI include my home among those so willing. Not long ago, I had 10 bucks in my pocket, and was ready to do my part to preserve the audio heritage of strangled-voice singers with odd haircuts. Idling my way through a stack of tapes, a breathless young man suddenly rushed up and asked the woman hosting the sale if he could borrow her mobile phone. He didn't have change for the pay phone, he explained, and needed to make an urgent call. She looked at him like he was from another planet. "That's an inappropriate request," she said. After a moment of wheedling on his part, she confessed she didn't even own a mobile phone. At this point the breathless young man looked at her like she was from another planet. He turned to me. "I didn't bring mine with me," I said. "You didn't bring it with you?" he repeated, accusingly, and then gave me the from-another-planet-look. On Second Thought, Count Me OutI tried to feel a twinge of guilt, but failed. Sure, I was missing some very important calls that bright Saturday morning, but on the other hand, I wasn't sorting through ugly lamps and broken Happy Meal toys with a phone glued to my head, talking loudly, and trying to look important, either. The trade-off, in my opinion, was worth it. The breathless young man jogged off. He seemed to be a guy who considered a mobile phone the most important possession you could ever own, and yet he didn't have one. What's more, he spent his Saturday morning dashing about and frowning at others for not having one. It was like not having your cake and eating it, too. I staggered homeward with my purchases (a leather briefcase missing a hasp, a B-52's cassette, and a floor lamp so ugly it drew stares). I pondered the fate of America. Well, I pondered my garage, anyway. Scattered about the garage, I have an old Mac, an long-forgotten PC, two dysfunctional monitors, three keyboards, a broken scanner, three cell phones, and four shoeboxes full of CDs. If I held a garage sale tomorrow, would anyone buy any of it? Somehow, I doubt it. I further doubt that mobile phones, unlike rotary phones, will ever be collectible. Even CDs just don't have the same panache as vinyl. Nobody treats old computers with fondness — well, maybe some people do, but not the way they look at pinball machines, arcade games, or even Atari, for example. I noticed something else at all the garage sales. Nestled comfortably among the used floppy disks, treadmills, broken radios, tape players, chipped salad bowls, bread machines, and hideous vases were ... cordless phones. You can't pay people to take this stuff away. Believe me, I've tried. Ian Shoales lives in San Francisco with a Sega Saturn game system that he's willing to sell for a dollar on eBay.
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