pre-loved

things to do:
-destroy the word "used" and with it notions about scabies and funny smells and the ipod that fell off the truck (and destroy the facts from which those notions derive)
-make pre-loved more available. i have to look hard if i want to find a pre-loved something and that has to change
-get people's stuff out of their apartments so that there's more pre-loved stuff as an alternative to new stuff (also to free people of dust and clutter and all that evil)
-or else effectively get the stuff catalogued while it remains in their apartments
-defeat the cycle of buying new, unnecessary stuff all the time which is destroying the world and the people on it
-up with hand me downs (need a new name) (or maybe not, hand me down actually has a nice ring to it)
-up with the lasting, the durable, the supple leather of 10 year old boots
-and with it, up with retailers recycling back their old products. up with trade-ins (i think...)
-i went to east village shoe repair, which is the russian man in the whole in the wall on st. mark's place to the people that know it. the shop is a trash heap of shoes with which the russian man is intimately familiar, but which is a trash heap nonetheless. it struck me forcibly that there is a lot of work to do to change the face of that which has been owned already. one should not have to paw through such heaps to follow one's beliefs.
-i'm going to volunteer at housing works starting this saturday and i want to make sure i ask them lots of questions about how that business works. i am going to get knowledgeable, i've got enough blind excitement already -there should be return policies on pre-loved things. that everything is final sale at thrift stores instinctively makes one feel like a sucker, that they've finally pawned this thing off on someone and are glad to be rid of it. it means that they want it out of the store. this does not encourage people to shop at pre-loved stores.
 -i came across some cool hippy dippy sites today like freecycle.org on which you can tell the internet that you're dumping something on the street before you do. it is useful and good.
-fading! faded is the most elegant thing, the gradual replacement of the new with the sun and wind and touch.