Congratulations on Owning Your Very First Disco Ball!

It isn’t actually that odd for people in Portland who are collecting unemployment to just drive around all day looking at thrift stores. It’s a good way to apply for jobs that will only make you work twelve hours a week and sometimes you find some really neat shit that you can bring back to your eccentric house filled with people who have exposed tattoos and little or no work ethic.

Which is why no will be surprised to see you digging around in the nexus of madness that is The Bins, a self-contained slice of Portland where junk is paid for by the pound and the sheer number of bargains contained within the walls of the building has begun to warp reality, slowly driving anyone inside who is not currently engaged in the pursuit of bargains towards madness. But when you pull your scabby arms from the midst of a pile of clothes and old hangers and find yourself clutching a massive, glittering ball of majesty you’ll be beyond shocked. Your loser friend who offers witticisms and tips about which business will give their food to you if you can prove unemployment will be speechless for the first time all day.

You’ll heft the ball in the air above your head and stage whisper: “I must have this.”

Your retarded hippy friend will nod and the two of you will shuffle to the front of the store where you’ll deposit the globe on a scale. It will come out to a dollar seventy five total for the orb, and you’ll shell it out so fast you’ll forget to ask for an application, which is good because The Bins would’ve taken what little sanity you had left and spit it out like chaw or something else which is gross after being spit out.

You’ll retreat back to your home, dropping your hippy friend off along the way at his co-op squat under the Hawthorne Bridge.

“Tell me when it’s set up,” he’ll say, eyes glistening with anticipation. You’ll drive off without responding, only taking your eyes off the road to look back at the globe covered in an old Ramones t-shirt. You’ll keep it under the t-shirt while you walk inside, ignoring your roommates as they sit around the floor and play a game of Sorry, reeking of pot.

When you get to your room you’ll unwrap the t-shirt from the globe and just stare at its surface. You’ll be sobering up from your morning bowl by this point and the combination of that rush of returning mental energy and the profundity of finding this worthless, cast off object in a place full of things like that and removing it to bring it back to your home will paralyze you. You’ll sit there for nearly forty five minutes, examining the imperfections of the ball before you even try hanging it on its suspension device.

You’ll watch it spin, slowly and elegantly, occasionally playing a flashlight over it in silence. It will, more or less, work, and you’ll feel good about that, like you have something to protect now. You’ll feel like you rescued something important from obscurity, like saving this meaningless little item will somehow have helped you get some part of your life back again.

Congratulations on Owning Your Very First Disco Ball