Discouragement [2008]

[Journal passage, 2/3 April 2008]

♃♀

 before 7:08 m PDT—I’m discouraged at the moment. I had high hopes of selling that antique sheet music I’ve been hanging on to for the past thirty years; prices are looking reasonable, though sales through the internet (judging from others who are selling similar artifacts on eBay) appear to be shall we say hit and miss. There is some interest in the stuff, but the people who seem to be having the most success are those who sell it in lots, rather than as individual pieces. Price seems to be about $5.00 per piece, but drops to $1.50 or less when sold in lots. (Around $12.00 for a lot of ten, actually.) Some people seem to be buying it for framing, because the pictures are attractive and period pieces.

A box containing about two hundred pieces of sheet music had ended up on the porch by the door, where it seemed to me to be safe enough. I mean, who would take something like that, right? I’ve been pulling random pieces from it and checking the song and composers out on the internet, with some interesting results, but no stunning rarities or anything like that. Still, some of these people are being collected, and at least one of them had a kind of interesting life story. But—

Today, believe it or not, somebody stole the box from the front porch, along with a suitcase, 3X5 file box, and some other stuff. When I went out in the morning, they were all gone. I spent a large part of the day going up and down the street to see if they had been discarded anywhere nearby, but no luck. Not a sign of any of the stuff.