At Share, unboxing, the most appalling kitsch, resin angels, ceramic cats, carved wooden pigs, somebodies entire life collection of dust collectors, knick-knacks, trifles, curios, curated by the most undiscriminating eye, put away into storage, lovingly wrapped in newspapers.
Old newspapers. The highest quality of reading. National Enquirer, the Sunday Sport, Weekly World News. The Columnist, Ed Anger - "My America", tales of Bat-Boy, escaped from a lab and terrorizing the US, lonely hearts, agony aunts. I get distracted reading out the headlines.
I miss these. I mean, in Edmonton, once in a while I would buy them and laugh all the way through. But they've long since disappeared. Britain, well, they still have them.
But what I miss most of all is the fact that they were all - universally acknowledged - occasionally amusing, but otherwise complete and utter rubbish.
Nowadays, Fox News, Tucker Carlson - the quality of rubbish is the same but turned to a political ends, and too many believe it.
And so I read the clippings out loud for the amusement of the volunteers, staff, and sadly think of the time when people were a bit less credulous, more skeptical, when a lie was a lie, and think of the labels we should be applying to our era. There was modernism, post modernism - how to describe the political, social, moral landscape now?
Post-Truth. The Truth nowadays is irrelevant, nobody cares. We live in the Post-Truth era.