It’s always a wonderful feeling when you’re on vacation in a beautiful place, and realize that they’re about to have a flea market or yard sale. It’s especially welcome when you find yourself enjoying the local culture and the community, because when these events are happening, you suddenly have an unusual opportunity. This can be even more exciting than tasting something new in a new place, and loving it. Because in this scenario, you can buy a piece of their souls and take it home with you. Ocean City is a particularly attractive place, and they have plenty of hotels to demonstrate for you how beautiful the city really is.
If you love the beach, and who doesn’t, then this is the place. It’s had a long and very successful run as a major tourist attraction, and it’s also built up a very lively local community over the generations. The community is strong enough to have their own aesthetics, philosophies, and moral outlook on the world. It’s difficult to say exactly what their cosmologies add up to, because there are multiple notions of the here and beyond, but it’s always possible to make some guesses with their artifacts. This is where the city wide yard sale comes into play.
You don’t have to have any formal anthropological or ethnographic training to know when there’s a bargain in front of you, nor does it take a degree to decide that a particular object has some cultural value. When you are sorting through clown paintings and ashtrays shaped like owls, it’s very possible to make some connections between the object and the community. The clown is the great trickster, and the owl is a messenger from the world of the dead, so we’ve stumbled upon something larger than ourselves here. There are other city wide garage sales, but they speak of other worlds, too far away from here.
