Saturday, April 1, 2017

Michael David Cobb Bowen — The Palm Springs Phenomenon

The malls are the soon to be ghost towns
So long, farewell, good-bye. -- Modest Mouse



There are two ideas that come to mind when I think of Palm Springs. It's nice to be my age, because I have two ideas and three stories. One of the stories involves dirtbikes and golf bunkers, but that's another story. This is about one of the two ideas, that I am naming the Palm Springs Phenomenon. It is prompted by a headline I read off Facebook. The whole story is here

The song 'Teeth Like God's Shoeshine' asks the question "Do you have a lot of what you need to survive?" We do, for the time being. We also have a lot of stuff we don't need. It's rather odd to think that there are people on the planet who will never have a garage, much less enough junk to have a garage sale. But when you're rich in America, you have an estate sale when you get low on cash and you don't want to sell the vacation house. Or maybe the vacation house itself is part of the estate sale. When I had money to burn and a house less than chock full of requisites, the Spousal Unit and I would go hunting for garage sales and estate sales. I'm not ashamed to say that it took over 30 years of working in my career before I had enough credit to afford the furniture that all the marketing in the world made me lust after. Now I have the big leather sofa and love seat. Thanks Synchrony Bank! 

Read more: http://cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2017/03/the-palm-springs-phenomenon.html