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 $10,000 worth of items in a month. It’s a ridiculous goal. But naturally I’m going to say that so I can either gloat when it all works out or giggle when it doesn’t.  

The reason for the goal is because I’m trying to distract myself from jumping back into edits on a book that I finished writing in March. Figure I oughta distract myself with reselling, since at least I’ll be earning some money in that case, and that I can do business way more effectively if I half-convince myself it’s possible to abruptly earn something like 900% of my normal income just cuz I said so.

I thrifted a decent pile of material over the past week and now that it’s all photographed I just have to list it on eBay. Set the asking price. It’s not difficult or all that time-consuming but it can be tedious after a while. The way I normally like to do it is I spend one or two hours just photographing fifteen or thirty things and then I take a shower and walk up the street to a nice ambient twinkly bar with an older crowd and mid-volume music and good happy hour prices. Hop on a stool and order a beer and get it all done in a sweep. It’s meditative that way. I enjoy it. 

Today is Easter Sunday, though, so the bars have spotty hours and the crowds are unpredictable. Any holiday that involves people getting together with family in the first part of the day could culminate in an unpredictable climate. 

Instead of getting my beer at the nearby bar I walked up the street to 7-11 and grabbed a single Voodoo Ranger out of the cooler and took it up to the counter (I’m reading a book called The Secret History of Groceries incidentally and 7-11 is waaay older and way more influential than I thought; they were like the first grocery store). There’s two registers side-by-side, one tended by a man and the other by a woman, both looking tired but they’re talking and seem engaged. Good moods. I go up to the woman and hold up the bottle and she nods and rings me up. 

“Two seventy-five.”

I reach for my wallet as the door opens and a guy comes in. Mid-forties with salty hair and chin stubble. A skateboard under his arm. Sweaty. Catching his breath. Smiling. He comes and leans on the counter and says to the other cashier, “Do you guys have whole pizzas?” He nods at the oven area over their shoulders, in the corner. “Like, ready ones? Cooked?”

That cashier doesn’t answer. Instead, brows up and palms turned out like a bystander, he looks at this cashier.

The one who just rang up my Voodoo Ranger.

She looks at this customer and says, “Yeah we got pizzas but today’s only only the Cheese and the Meats.”

Guy nods. “OK.” He goes for his wallet. “Lemme get a pepperoni then.”

She blinks at him. Shakes her head. “No no,” holds up two hands, “there’s only the Meats,” presenting one kind of phantom pizza with this upturned palm, “and Cheese,” presenting the other phantom pizza on the other upturned palm. 

Guy unflolds his wallet. “Yeah.” Curt nod. “I get that. I’ll do pepperoni.”

My cashier puts her palms together. Laces her fingers. Takes a deep breath. “We have Meats pizza…and we have Cheese pizza. There’s no pepperoni.”

Guy looks back and forth between them, “Pepperoni’s not a meat?”

It’s really hard to tell if he’s fucking with everyone so I try to be invisible by holding the Voodoo Ranger bottle close to my nose and studying the label, as if I’m only just noticing their mascot is a skeleton wearing a hat; as though the beer suddenly makes more sense.

“The Pepperoni Pizza,” she’s telling him, “is the Pepperoni Pizza.” She gestures at something way outside the door, in the parking lot. “Thats not what I’m talkin about. Pepperoni Pizza is something else. The Meats pizza is a seven-meat pizza.”

Guy gets gymnastic with his eyebrows and says, “OK,” shrugging, “seven meats on the pizza, what’re the meats?”

Again with a deep breath, counting off with fingers on a palm, she says, “Pepperoni’s one, there’s also–”

“OK, that’s what I said, that’s fine, I’ll take the peppero—”

“There’s six other meats!”

She closes her eyes as soon as she says it and touches her face and steps back from the register, like she really didn’t mean to shout it. 

Almost like she couldn’t believe it. 

This thing she’d just done.

Which I guess is kinda my point with the $10k goal for April, is that you never really know what you’re capable of doing until you put it out there, y’know?