Thousand Movie Project

One thing you notice, working at a grocery store, is the number of people in your area who are eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also called SNAP, and previously called the Food Stamp Program, but referred to more colloquially as EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer).  It’s a government-issued card that helps people in tight financial situations to pay for groceries.…

On reddit this week I was reading about the CIA whistleblower who’s getting lots of attention for his claims that the US has full and partial spacecrafts from an alien species (several, in fact, plus preserved corpses of pilots) and that they’ve been here on US soil since the end of World War II, when the first one was stolen from Italy. Lots of people seem to believe this guy’s telling the…

What I’ve told myself and Marie and what I’m now telling you is that my reselling goal for April has been to earn $10,000.   For context: I’ve now been operating an eBay store for five months. In that time I’ve grossed $4,000. Only about $1,800 of that is profit because my understanding of shipping costs has been less a curve and more like a wall. I don’t actually believe I can do it. Sell…

I should have gone thrifting with my day off but instead I stayed home and played with two books on the couch. There’s a newish biography of the novelist James Ellroy called Love Me Fierce in Danger by Steven Powell that I got an early copy of (thanks NetGalley!) but that was back in December, before the January release, so now I’m late to the game. Ellroy is still alive and publishing and the…

This week I listened again to an interview the Louisiana Channel did with the novelist Colm Toibin who’s most famous for a book called Brooklyn and most recently he released a big novel about Thomas Mann that seems to’ve been mostly either trashed or ignored. He’s a writer of great enough stature that if a major publication doesn’t remark on his latest book it’s because they’d rather not be…

Today is my 32nd birthday and it’s always nice to imagine that your birthday is a grand moment for reflection and, if you’ve got a platform like this one, dispensing wisdom. Marie listens to a podcast out of Spain where a precocious 21-year-old host recently interviewed her father. Said they could talk about whatever he wanted to talk about and he said he wanted to talk about his advice, culled…

Chris Whipple is a good author whose latest book, his third, is also the first deep-diving contemporary history about Joe Biden’s administration. It’s called The Fight of His Life and it’s terrific.  Whipple started as a journalist so his prose is spare and he doesn’t waste any space, never gets wordy, plus it’s been an eventful couple years by the standards of any administration, so there’s…

Got to the bins just as the huge doors were unbolting, and trundling creaking open, and the small group of coffeeguzzle chainsmokers, idling in flip-flops and shorts, broke out giggling, standing upright from wherever they’d been leaning, shifting their weight from foot to foot and watching the door open wider, wiiider, wider until it’s wide enough to fit through and then they’re jogging,…

I’ve gotten good at bagging groceries. It’s not the sort of thing I’d brag about publicly but since it’s just us here I’ll take the confession a step further by saying this: I’ve gotten very good at bagging groceries. I wait until everything’s been rung up and there’s a great chaotic pile of delicious on the counter. Then I get to work on it. A real craftsman. I’m awful with road directions and…

On Wednesday I woke up thinking I was tired but it turned out I was sick with something. A 48-hour stomach thing.  It wasn’t terrible. I’m not a masochist and my pain threshold is low but if the environment is comfortable I’m usually happy to be a little sick. It gives me the same feeling I get in airports which is this: I look around, see there are no pencils, and slap my hands on my thighs and…

I woke up at 4:30 with an upset stomach, feeling dizzy, but figured I was just tired. Took a colder shower than usual and went easy on the coffee and sat at my desk and worked on the book for a little while.   For a weeks I’ve kept a good pace of editing 12-15 pages with each sitting but this morning I only got through seven before getting restless and spacey. It’d only been an hour but I stood…

The best way to learn about reselling is to watch videos about it on YouTube, or chime in on forums like r/flipping, where one of the most-discussed topics is the eBay algorithm. What’s an algorithm? Like pronography it’s hard to describe but easy to identify. The idea, I think, is that when a piece of artificial intelligence is given a task to complete, an algorithm is the network of…

Sales were slow on Monday and got slower and slower until stopping altogether on Thursday. Friday was my first day off after the streak of dead sales so I was waiting outside the bins when they opened at 8 a.m. but I was moody from such a bad sales week and dragged that cloud inside the warehouse and it hovered overhead while I sifted through the bins and I think that’s why I didn’t find…

Woke up at 3:30 this morning because I was sweaty in bed even though the room was cold. I wanted to get some writing done anyway so I showered and got dressed and started the day.   Left for the bins at 7:30 and got there a few minutes before 8. I’ve stood out outside with all the othe resellers at 7:55 before but it’s Monday morning and this past weekend the clocks jumped forward an hour so…

A couple months ago I found a sleepy Goodwill in a desolate place that had some great finds. I bought a $3 film-developing apparatus and flipped it for $17.50.  I bought two unopened boxes of HP toner, one black and one red, for $3 apiece; the black one sold for $70, the red one $45.  For $2 I bought a Joel Osteen Ministries™ Bible and sold it on eBay for $28.  The last one created something…

Thursday morning bins were alright. I woke up at 4 a.m. to get a couple hours of writing done. Made it to the bins just after the doors had opened and the man with the powdered hair was already walking the aisles with his hands behind his back, talking to people.  The most-trafficked part of the warehouse is the back part. Three rows of bins full of media, electronics, random valuables. Cigar…

Over the past four months while working at a grocery store I’ve been earning some side income by flipping things on eBay. The best place to get cheap things is thrift stores. Garage sales tend to be difficult for the same reason record companies work with agents rather than artists: when someone is selling you something from their personal life they tend to have a distorted notion of its value.…