We were always on the lookout for strange and unusual things that we
could collect, hopefully for free, and the we would exaggerate their
qualities to our friends who had money to buy actual cool things so
that we would then have something that they didn't. For example, my
friend may have something like a G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier, actually
not may have, he definitely had a one. There was absolutely no
way I could buy something more cool than that, I just didn't have the
money to keep up materialistically. Therefore, I would find a
fossil, a sharks tooth, a scorpion, or horny toad, then all I had to
do was pretend that I had just come into possession of something
much-much-more-muchly cool than some silly old aircraft carrier,
which I still not so subtly coveted. Subtle-bragging and off-handed
dismissiveness of someone else's treasures is a venerable tradition
with a beautiful and storied past, present and future. It is
basically the best weapon of the second-placer and the also-rans.
Anyway, my problem with this is that I was also a little money
grubber that was always looking for a way to sell anything I had for
a little cash money. So these two competing needs to brag and to sell
came into competition more then once but most tragically over
something we found and called the rabies rock. We were down walking
the train tracks one day when we came upon a rock that was really
hard and red and bumpy, in short awesome. We were in the habit, my
brother, sister and I of breaking open any cool rock we found hoping
against hope that it was a geode. We would take the rocks and put
them in my dad's powerful floor vise and hit them with a sledge
hammer to hopefully release all of the glitz and glamor and earning
potential that is a geode. Not to spoil the suspense but we never
found one. This rabies rock though was really hard and no matter how
many times we hit it with the sledge it would not break, which
coupled with its odd surface and color figured to be an easy and
expensive sale. My sister and I made up some fliers and a poster
touting it's various qualities and distributed them around the
neighborhood. Then we set up a table by the road with this great
centerpiece rock and several other curios, or more aptly objects
de arte. We had the rabies rock modestly priced at $20 a steal of
a value if I ever saw one, we had quite a few lookie-loos but no one
with a serious offer on the rabies rock so we slashed the price in a
special 75% off sale and finally moved the rock to a neighbor kid for
five bucks which got split 60-40 because my sister told me that there
was no way to split five dollars evenly, which I knew was untrue but
I loved my sister and two bucks is still a lot of penny candy, sugar
daddies, black cows, and slap sticks.
