Like shopping in a mausoleum

Spent Sunday in Santa Barbara with Mine. 

Pretty town - very Spanish. Quite classy. Looks like everything was a mission at some point, I should read some history about the area but probably won't get around to it.

We strolled around, went into a few shops. There's a Turkish Delight store there owned by a Turkish couple - it's the real deal, imported from Istanbul. SB, nice town - a good day trip from LA. Clean, lush, quiet. Though that might have been because of the Super Bowl, I will have to check on another, more typical Sunday.

This post is about thrifting, specifically how I realized this past weekend that I just cannot stomach it.
It puts me on edge. It makes me melancholic... Gives me an overall sick feeling that bubbles up into tears.

I used to be all about old things - clothes, antiques, relics, whatever. Retro stuff was cool to me and I appreciated the kitschiness of it all.. however every now and then I'd get some weird heavy feeling, browsing through creaking aisles of historical flotsam. As I've gotten older, interest in thrifting has waned and the heavy, sad feeling is much more pronounced. 

Usually, when I feel this way, I just leave the store and put the bad feeling down to boredom or there not being anything that interests me but this last Sunday, Mine and I popped into a pretty established looking second hand store on the main street and took our time. 

I entered with an optimistic attitude with a mission to find some whiskey glasses. I took a few turns, rustled through a few things that caught my eye and enjoyed the oldies classics on the sound system. After a few laps though, that sickly heavy haunting feeling started to settle in. Instead of bailing I just took a few more laps; I didn't want to make Mine leave and I kept thinking maybe those whiskey glasses would show up. 

Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues came on the stereo as I took another turn around the store. That song's pretty haunting in its own right but coupled with the atmosphere, the mood got extremely phantasmic. I started to feel pretty raw and sped up my laps to try to get enough stimulus to drown out the upwelling of emotional nausea. Unsuccessfully.

Anyway, that's the context... 

Everything I encountered on the shelves of that store had so much historical weight, it was inescapable. 

I'd see a commemorative crystal decanter, engraved to mark the occasion it was made for and I'd imagine the guests at the event and what they were wearing, saying, feeling... or a set of teacups that some old lady might have had for decades, only bringing out when she had imporant guests over for tea time.. or a bakelite ornament that seemed really pretty and special and precious when it was new, that the owner saved up money working at their Saturday job to buy or was gifted it by someone close to them...... it didn't matter what it was that I came across - I could see an imagined history for each and every trinket, artifact, keepsake, souvenir.... the convergence of thousands of years of cumulative experience pressed down on me. It was this weight that made me feel so sick and emotional. It was like shopping in a mausoleum, wading through the memorabilia of years and years worth of countless strangers' lives.

You could assume that that would be a nice feeling; to feel close to people who have long gone by continuing to love and appreciate an object that had meaning to them too, when they owned it... but to me it just felt sad. Maybe because these objects, in their current setting, don't get given the respect that they might deserve and are treated as bric-a-brac... cultural fodder that people buy ironically.

It seems sad to me that people live their entire lives with passion and meaning and then disappear, only to continue through a connection with an object that might get picked up for cheap decades later by someone who has no interest in knowing the life that the object had before.

Sad. 

But that's mortality I guess.