When we first moved in together, my wife had a slew of these little glasses from the ‘50s and ‘60s she’d gotten out of thrift store, back when Richmond had one of the best thrift store districts in southside, before the ebays fucked that all up for everybody, and they’ve been in our household ever since. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in the past six months, I decided I wanted more of these, which led to internet research. Well, in the ebays, they go for like ten bucks a pop, but I learned they were mostly made by Hazel Atlas glass company (which I usually mistakenly call Hazel Atkins, on purpose), and if ebay is any indicator, they are popular amongst homos as wacky retro-fare. I was about to try and get some from inside the ebays, but buying shit off ebay is so easy and annoying - you just bid, get caught up in “having” to have something, spend way more money than you should, and then it just gets mailed to you with no work involved. Shopping in shitty thrift stores is so much more satisfying, digging your fingers through musty glasses set up on shelves by recovering crackheads for Christ. We took a family trip to North Carolina a month ago, looking for shit like this (as well as other articles of nonsense) in thrift and junk and antique stores in the Raleigh/Durham area, and found a couple of them. But this led to me poking through antique stores in my area, looking for more of them, at a reasonable rate (which doesn’t always exist at antique stores). Poking around antique stores is a hard thing because those places are gay as fuck, meaning if you see five dudes looking around at bullshit in one of those places, one of them is old, one of them is begrudgingly occupying his time while his wife looks at old farm cabinets, two of them are gay dudes, and the other one is a wild card, which is my way of pretending me being in antique stores is not gay, because truthfully the fifth one is gay too, just probably more repressed than the other two more openly gay guys shopping the antique store.
Anyways, I have found more of these, and we now have far too many to really be proud of. Mostly these glasses are a map of the state, with major cities (at that stage in time) marked with dots, plus little caricatures of industry or noteworthy landmarks, as well as useless information like state nickname or song or some such trivia. They come frosted in different flavors (which can be pimped like our blue frosted Kentucky one, or the oddly toxic-looking frosted orange D.C. one), or have the state maps painted in yellow or lime green or odd pink paint. We even found one that was like black with gold markings, but it was all faded and dinged up at one of those crackheads for christ thrift stores. However, I found a stand in one antique store that had another one like that, in perfect condition, like that, and the black with gold markings style is straight pimp. The one I saw was North Carolina, which normally I would’ve snatched up, as Carolina del Norte ranks high on my list of desirable localities, but the old bitch at this stand was wanting six bucks a glass. I stretched my limit one time and bought a few at five per glass, when I was accumulating, but mostly I ain’t paying more than three bucks a glass.
See, obviously I’ve hit the mad homo stage of the state glasses, because now it’s no longer just straight up collecting of the style, but it’s become more like a sports team, with salary caps and shit, where I’m not paying a lot for minor members of the collection, and even if I find a shelf full of these things for three bucks each, if it’s not a good state or wacky looking, I won’t get it. I could turn my blog super-internetty and post digital pics of my favorite glasses, but even me in all my personal faggotries can’t come that far out the closet.
No comments:
Post a Comment