The Everything-Goes Garage Sale of My Love

I spent a decade reading every short story that appeared in The New Yorker. Most of the time I thought they were crap and flicked the page in disgust, moving on to the movie reviews. But I also sensed that there was a secret sauce involved, and I wanted to know what it was.

My friend Ian and I joked about the lameness of so many of these stories that always seemed to revolve around some divorcé(e) getting drunk at a garage sale and sinking into a miasma of upper-middle-class ennui. We were snotty about it, for sure, but we also wanted to know why those stories seemed to work so well despite being so off-putting (to us) in their subject matter.

This story, THE EVERYTHING-GOES GARAGE SALE OF MY LOVE, was an attempt to co-opt and hijack some of those New Yorker themes and apply them to a context that was more familiar to me: late-90's hipster angst. I wrote this story in Zacatecas, Mexico, around 2001, when adult responsibilities were just beginning to settle on me, and the angst of youth still felt evocative. The Piltdown Review published it in the summer of 2018.