Dear Creepy Route Nine Flea Market,

Where did you go? I know that I haven't visited you in about a year, but you know my work schedule. I was very disappointed when I went to attend you on my birthday this year, as is my annual tradition, and you were no longer there. Where once stood the empty husk of an abandoned Service Merchandise crammed full of crap, there only stood the empty husk of an abandoned Service Merchandise. Tragically, not full of crap. Let's not question the truly pathetic tradition of marking my aging by sifting through other people's slightly sticky, undesired possessions. It's just something I do, okay? It beats being at home and being sticky.

Where else will I go to find overpriced action figures of Sugar Man? Where can I find a record vendor with a very specially marked section of Records with Saucy Covers? Where will I find framed portraits of Jesus with electric, undulating lights behind him to emphasize His Eternal Light, or possibly, his infestation of electric eels? I called him Jeelzus, but we'll never meet again. eBay will not replace you, Creepy Route Nine Flea Market, because it is only in person that you can truly appreciate a stall of hanging meats of questionable odours and origins perched next to a display of five-for-a-dollar turn of the century photographs and Harley Davidson jackets. Sure, Amazon sells meats now, but it's just not the same. You can't fish 30 flavours of pickles out of murky tubs on Amazon.

You'd wind your way through the twisting, disordered corridors of the Route Nine Flea Market, something akin to a shantytown, where every vendor just seemed to drop everything wherever they might have found a free space without too many spider nests. Near the front doors, there was some semblance of geometry to the stalls, but the deeper you progressed, into misplaced barren spots with stacked chairs and cracked floors, and other crowded glass cases of sex toys and Shazam! drinking glasses (which are two things which should never meet), aisles twisted into godless shapes and folded in on themselves. Windowless, impenetrable areas, demarcated by stacks of water-damaged books and men in stained t-shirts passively quoting unusual prices on things, like 'thirty-seven cents', or 'howbout a lock of your purdy hair, baby?' The guy in the parking lot selling Adult DVDs from a darkened van for 15 bucks a pop only took money, though. I hear. I don't know for sure. When you have cable internet, you don't need to buy porn from vans in parking lots anymore.

There is but one photographic record that I have of this flea market, dated December of 2002. This record is a series of photographs, taken by Brian, of a mini-adventure that we went on one December when our dorm room was just too small to handle. They may be fuzzy, due to the omnipresent poor lighting, but it's all we have left. The Flea Market is where I took a pretty redhead one year, and where I found the masterpiece of cinema, Creating Rem Lezar, and where one could always be sure to find many Nintendo Scratch-Off Game Cards in yellow wax packs buried beneath rusted wrenches. Let's take a tour of this flea market, in a post-mortem examination of one of the more unique experiences on the East Coast. Screw the Statue of Liberty - this is the genuine Americana.

We've always found ourselves amused by the intense visual discrepancies between early video game covers and the actual gameplay. While the front of the package tells epic tales of fighting realistic space robots with future-lazers, the back of the package lays down the cruel truth, like finding out that your favorite candy is made from teeth and blowholes. That's what you get for buying Whalicious, though. Read the package. You're a rectangle in a slow-motion battle with another rectangle with a rectangle sticking out of it. Still, for those of us who couldn't catch a pop fly to left field if our d20s depended on it, we'd found our arena. Please note, though, that there is NOTHING berserk about this game. Really, nothing at all. You'd have to light it on fire and somehow launch it into space before it even started being berserk.

Please also note the ceramic bunny in the background with the snapped-off head, being sold in tandem with said Berserk game, because people will try to sell ANYTHING that isn't attached to them with a working circulatory system. THAT is berserk.

The Creepy Flea Market also had its share of rare items, such as this Japanese action figure of a naked demon, priced at 10 dollars per exposed nipple. A fair price, I say!

Rare are the places that hold evidence that Boris the Bear was ever a good idea.

Okay, it's possible that Boris the Bear WAS a good comic, but I wasn't going to spend twenty five cents to find out. Dark Horse, a semi-unknown entity at that point, was making an attempt at parody by creating a knock-off character who traversed the comic universes and slaughtered knock-off characters and other painfully self-referential issues within the comic universe. A noble, if not misguided, endeavor, since it had already been done about ninety thousand times by this point. Adding more crap to the pile of crap doesn't make it a BETTER pile of crap... unless it's the Creepy Flea Market.

Don't let this illusion of organization on the right fool you. This part of the flea market could actually only reached through a gamut of well-trained rodent ninjas. The claustrophobia is clear enough, but it's not a bad kind of claustrophobia, since it's rife with possibility, like getting lost in an infinite watermelon field. You'd never go hungry, or thirsty, and a watermelon could always serve as your pillow, unless it was one of those jagged, square watermelons, or a watermelon/cactus hybrid, or if they were explosive. Then, I wouldn't suggest sleeping on them. Or if you have a watermelon allergy.

There was probably a stall of old folks butchering live cattle and selling toasters right behind this anyhow. Don't let these 'shelves' and 'arrangement' fool you for a second.

Now, you might question why a cougar would be described as 'lonesome'. Perhaps is it because "the female has a distinct scream that has been described as nerve-wracking, demoniac, terror-striking, a trilling wail". Were I a man-cougar, and I'm not saying I'm not, I think I'd probably want to keep as far away from anything that could be described, in any way, as 'demoniac'. I already had one of those, thanks, Nadine. I don't care what kind of hot cougar tail could be scored. A Google search for 'cougar' also brought up the result of John Mellencamp, and if that isn't enough of a reason to force oneself into hermitude and celibacy and possibly castration, I don't know what is. Charlie, you go on being lonesome. I think it's warranted, and don't let Disney tell you otherwise. And please, four dollars? I could buy three prostitutes in the next stall for that much! Wait, there's some now.

And this guy has an eyepatch! He's clearly from some battle that involved lots of ripped clothing and no physical harm whatsoever. IN A WORLD... where tailors charge way too much... this is the worst harm that you can do. He's just gonna have to walk around like that, and he so totally has a date tonight, poor guy. Torn shirt and camo pants does not a lay score.

These are pretty representative of how most used toys could be found here - matted hair, bare-chested, missing a limb or a face, floundering in obscurity, in great big orgy-bins of forgotten pleasure and gnaw-marks and sticker glue residue. Sure, it's not pretty, but finding some kind of tecnho-Skeletor toy at the bottom of the bin, or a Peter Venkman whose fright feature still worked was worth the grime.

Here, we see a clown afflicted with balloonophasia, a disease in which one's head becomes engorged with many multicolored bubbles. This item is from the Dangers of the Circus Tent line, which was a short-lived side-project from the good folks over at Hummel. Unfortunately, the line was cancelled after tiger maulings became less hilarious, given the Roy Horn debacle. Only slightly less hilarious, though.

Okay, I have no idea what this is, but if I ever get into a state where I want this in my house, unless it's in some entirely ironic sense, kill me. Kill me by grinding this up into my food. I won't mind.

In this next photo, I provide an example of the effect of Ghostbusters on my hair. Specifically, Egon, and specifically, INSTANT FRO. One can also witness my proclivity towards scarves and exaggerated expressions of disbelief. Look, there are totally boobs RIGHT behind me and I didn't even notice them until NOW, three years later. I'm seriously going to revisit my priorities. Egon is great and all, and I even made up buttons of him and invited people into my Secret Egon Club during college, but never would I have done so at the forfeit of cleavage.

There's a story to these old folks, but there's also another example of the immortal aesthetic of the Market. Sheets strung up by clothespins between stalls was a pretty normal method of territorialism here, albeit a slightly chaotic one. Now, Brian and I wandered around the stall of these old folks for a bit. Two of the old ladies were clearly unable to move under their own power anymore, and the old guy standing up was heading there rapidly. It was one of those nervous situations where I had to wonder if they were doing this because they liked doing it every weekend, or if they were selling old collectible things for food money, because I'm ridiculously sensitive like that. Either way, I was compelled to get SOMETHING from them if it meant them having a nice dinner. I poked around until I found this foreign set of knockoff Lego alphabet blocks, which were very clearly unfit for the hands of anyone under the age of 25, due to sharp, brittle edges and gross misinformation. Misinformation on alphabet blocks? Yes indeed. In fact, I wrote an article about these blocks back on the first incarnation of ResonantFish, and HERE IT IS, dug up from the archival CD-Rs. They were glad to sell the blocks, even for a buck, and congratulated each other on the sale after I walked away. This is one of the warmer memories I'll take away from you, Creepy and Aptly Named Flea Market. I will not miss that bad, bad, bad hair day.

Don't know how to say it? Say it with bugs! And apparently, paper plates! Buying old plush creatures from tag sales is always a dangerous thing to do. Plushes are things that often spend EVERY NIGHT in bed with small, germy children and their bacteria and bugs, through measles and chicken pox and various influenzas. After that, they sit in attics and become fodder for the nests of small mammals. And then? At that point, they're practically biological weapons. They're the pox-infested blankets that we give to the Native Americans, except this time, with googly eyes, and they're given to children. A mattress alone can harbor thousands of bacterial colonies that are nigh-impossible to destroy, and no kid's gonna be huggin' on a mattress nearly as much as they hug on something anthropomorphic. SO, here's my advice : only give these to stupid children. Save the genepool.

Among these photos, I found 2 examples of exactly why the Creepy Flea Market got its name. Every so often, you'd turn a corner and come face to face with... nothing. Somehow, everyone else knew that this blind corner was there and avoided it. Who knew what lurked in the darkness? Or strangely, the surreal indoor brightness? Boxes without owners, unfinished walls, maybe a sleeping hobo with a campfire and a freshly caught rodent on a spit, slowly turning. Brian actually titled these photos 'creepy alley' and 'gross alley', so maybe that says it all. He called the photo of the old folks 'Collin's Favorite Old People', and the guy with the eyepatch, 'Cap'n I-Patch'. Don't get excited, but he called the next one 'Collin Weenie'.

Clearly, I'm embarrassed.

Another unique aspect of the Flea Market was the use of the apostrophe. Nearly EVERY sign that advertised anything in plurals would use an apostrophe before the final 's'. This is evidenced on this Smurf-infested table, in which "smurfs" becomes "smurf's". This happed at such a frequency that before too long, I simply accepted it as a dialect, much like "y'all" and "bling" became accepted into our lexicon. Pretzels became the possessive "pretzel's", as if the pretzels were actually declaring ownership of something. I mean, not to say that pretzels shouldn't have the same rights as us, but honestly. Grow a grammar gland and use it, guys. A salty exoskeleton doesn't free you from the bounds of proper language usage.

And totally, underpants! Why did Brian take pictures of The Hunter underpants ad nauseam? And would you buy undies at a flea market? I mean, other than for the package pictures.

Of course, you can't spell 'eclectic' without 'case full of overpriced dragon statues that you put on top of the TV next to the sparking cable box but will get knocked over by the cat anyhow'. Especially when sold in tandem with calculators and plastic ice cubes with bugs in them. So ridiculously classy that I think I just sprouted a monocle.

So maybe none of this was special to anyone but me. I was going to go there on my birthday and pay any price it took to finally get that Pee Wee's Playhouse playset that had been sitting there for 3 years. Maybe pick up another handful of old photographs for some art project, trinkets to paint on and include in assemblages, old and obscure 45s, maybe a rash of some kind, but I can never do that again, and for this, I mourn. I sat sadly in the parking lot, after the 20 minute drive, and ate my egg sandwich and wondered where everything went.

What set the creepy flea market apart? If NOTHING else, this charmingly appropriate, half-assed sign that bid you farewell on your way out the door :

I hear that the 'h' killed a man.

G'bye, Creepy Route Nine Flea Market. May you resurface in some other abandoned landscape.

[all flea market review]