I've been trying to put a mental frame around that fortune for years. Until recently, I've been thinking about it in metaphysical terms: Indeed, I ask myself, if cheap things- cheap to me, cheap to my community of artists or friends or barely tolerated bus co-habitants, cheap to the Universal We- if cheap things have no value (and here I pause to pre-emptively congratulate myself on my huge, huge intellect,) are valuable things not cheap? Since I was thinking in the abstract and mainly silly Plane of the Important Ponderings, I would try to come up with the cheap things in question: to me, spitefulness; to the immediate community, self-medication with celebrity baby-bumps and pancreas-busting amounts of sugar; We, the ability to forget all about the man behind the curtain without even being asked...Then what would the valuable, potentially not-cheap things be? Me, self-acceptance, immediate community, a bucket-passing fire brigade; We...uh...an imagination big enough to dream up childhood vaccinations?...What was the question again?
If cheap things have no value, valuable things are not cheap? We are about to move to a different continent, and so there are a million things (about 998,210 more than I thought we had) in our house that need to be sold. And now I realize what it really meant: clearly the person who wrote it was also trying to sell everything they owned, and lacking a creditable means to comparison shop, they went to work and wrote it in cookie-fortune form in the hope that if enough of those cookies went out and were read by compassionate diners, a few of them might hunt him down to help him price the Ikea cabinet. I mean, it was their top-of-the-line when he bought it three years ago but now is missing a widget and has no badly-translated instructions to go with it- what is that worth? Craig's list is the only place where people who really need furniture and have bitty budgets go for the self-torture of shopping used and online- and Craig's list is unreliable. Ikea cabinets look exactly the same in every picture. They are described with very different adjectives. You see a lot of "brand new" and "still in good shape" and "okay" and "worked great for us for fifteen years" in the descriptions, and you'll see many prices that don't really match up with your unrealistic pricing-hopes, even though you got real with yourself while drunk on lite beer and knee-deep in receipts from a cobbler's bill that you put on the MasterCard that you closed out seven years ago, and the pictures of these Ikea Kaarlupvstoorgaart cabinets are identical.
I believe the trick is to do it piece-by-piece, which is hell on your TV time. Who wants to be sticking price tapes on your broken two-legged tripods (Still works! $
Broken futon frame? Since it's not just broken, it's busted up- I will sell this as firewood. I may be able to get a cord of large-sized kindling out of it (for those not raised on a farm, a "cord" of wood is a smallish pile. The determination of what constitutes a smallish pile is reserved entirely for career farmers who will look into the distance, take a pull on their PBR, and declare one smallish pile a cord and a twin smallish pile right next to it "a little light." It's just what they do.) There are area rugs- and what area rugs they are, with their thin spots from the household pet's lovin' spot (love to the rug, not to each other- you degenerate,) and their spill-free corners...these I shall price at $150 each, and I may just get away with that price because I plan to sell it to my daughter's friends by telling them brilliant adventures that may happen to them if they have the things in their bedroom. Then I'll sit back and let the calls from their parents overwhelm my voicemail...Or $50 for two. It depends on which plan is less work... For the table with the heap of my daughter's various artworks that she doesn't want to pack up and take- the table is $.25 (three-year-old Ikea particle board is basically table-shaped dust,) the artwork ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Does that sound high to you? I can't tell, because it is both valuable and cheap. So, yeah, a cool million, payable in cash or monopoly money, whichever is the better offer.
What I'd like to do is have an open house, letting friends and family and friends of friends come and wander around the place for a while, sipping on the delightful adult beverage that will be served to them by my child in a clean white tuxedo shirt, and then have an auction on the entire thing. One lot, folks, and a great deal may be had with the bid of just $1000, think of all the be-yoo-tiful furniture from Sweden yours in your own home and the vases that came with the bouquets from 1800flowers and the Blackberry phone only five years old and the other Blackberry folks, that's right two Blackberries with their chargers and these five Trader Joe's shopping bags full of alkaline batteries, you'll never go batteryless again simply go to your bag and start licking the nipple-like tops to find the ones with charge left in them and there are these ugly-ass heirlooms that have no use but were kept to avoid guilt- do I hear $1000? A great deal here folks you don't want to hesitate do I hear $800? Come on now you will not find a better array of random house furnishings for $750, $700 do I hear $700 let's get this thing going for $500, $500 is a steal for these plastic toy-bases, and you can spend be-yoo-tiful family time with your spouse and your children trying to figure out which base goes with which broken toy, better than any picture puzzle- Can I get a bid of $400?...
It will be all right. I will be in the back, pacing while my brother-in-law mixes stronger and stronger drinks in the vain hope that someone will get drunk enough to pipe in with "I'll take everything for $15,000! Woo!" and then pass out, arm up, hand holding out an envelope full of fifties. And sure, even though that won't happen, it's nice to imagine it all being done and wrapped up in a little Britain-bound bow. It's more than nice- it's invaluable.
You just need to remember what the not cheap valuable things are different from the invaluable cheap and the hyper valuable some valuable things.
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