Instead of working on the screenplay he’s writing, Austin filmmaker Jim Hickcox is spiraling through the depths of the internet’s classified ads
Some people must react to their anxiety by diving headlong into their work. Not me, buddy boy — I browse Craigslist. Something about the stripped-back interface and low resolution pictures of objects I could own is a balm to my soul. I’m meant to be writing a screenplay; I’m on page 72 right now, and have been for about a week. I need to be figuring out what these two 13-year-olds are talking about while they try to light and smoke a candy cigarette. That’s my job right now. But I’m not. I’m pricing houseboats.
On a normal day I look at motorcycles, cars and atv/utv a few times, and through several jobs and gigs sections once. If it’s been a rough day or I can’t sleep I’ll dip into free or heavy equipment. It helps that I neither need nor can afford a skid-steer, though it’s fun to imagine having one — it gets more dangerous when I wander into impulse-buy territory like tools. A $35 Sawzall? A whole pile of lawn edgers for $15? A high-volume water pump going cheap just because the motor doesn’t run? I don’t NEED any of those either, but I do have $50 and maybe a pair of oxy-acetylene cutting torches could burn away my existential dread.
These teens in my script are in a cool clubhouse setting sugar on fire and it smells bad. One of them is very upset and the other is trying to talk him down. Maybe that’s why I’m hung up, because I can’t help her calm this kid when I need to be calmed down myself. I stare at it for a bit, and then I take another pass at Craigslist, but I can’t look at the same cars over and over (I actually definitely can), so I find myself perusing every for sale category.
Slow Creep, a short film from Jim Hickcox on Vimeo.
Why? Do I even want anything from antiques? I sure don’t, but I’ve looked through it. Am I capturing a metatextual portrait of the world around me based on objects that people want to cast off? Am I absorbing some level of humanity? Or am I simply spiraling into my own stress behaviors? Surely both: clicking through those bare blue hyperlinks is some tragic salve on my mind, and there’s definitely some satisfaction to piecing together the state of my neighborhood through the weirdo stuff folks are selling. And there IS some weirdo stuff in antiques, but not the weirdest. The weirdest stuff, and I can say this with confidence, is filed under collectibles.
Here are a few highlights from the last two weeks of collectibles in my area:
A Smirnoff Ice bottle that shoots lightning
Ben the Clown — with bedroll!
A shrink-wrapped basketball
Pocket vase / portable urinal
Dennis Kirban’s Guide to Buick Grand Nationals (I won’t lie I’d almost pay the $50 they’re asking for this one)
Concrete Bulldogs (5)
Stuffed Papa Smurfs (2)
Stuffed Garfields (20)
“Frog Set”
A painting of a horse’s head
Three postings for the same 1/40 scale Cessna Citation
Basketball-Themed Cereal
“More than 10” rooster statues rendered in a variety of media
A wooden box
Related: Listen to previous episodes of CINESTHESIA, Jim’s podcast with Jason Michelitch
The lesson here is that anything is collectible if you want it to be. I might start offering up bags of cat fur; it certainly collects in corners around my house. Twelve-fifty a pop.
I’m pretty confident that I’ll never have $25,000 at once, but you can find yourself a pretty decent fixer-upper houseboat on Craigslist for that price. It’s cheaper than housing on land, plus you can just drift away from the shore. And if you drift far enough? FREE CRIMES. I only have to sell 2,000 bags of cat fur before I can drift into the ocean. If you don’t have that much fur, there are also some “live-aboard” smaller boats you can get for less than $10,000. It wouldn’t be as comfortable, but you could pretend to be a drunk P.I. in 1978 if you lived in one, and that’s certainly one version of a successful life. If I do that and learn to eat krill I’d never have to finish this screenplay.
The smart thing to do would be to skip to page 73 and loop back to 72 later because I’m pretty sure there’s some punchin’ on page 73, and I can definitely write punches right now. Before I do that, there’s one more element of these classified ads that I want to address and that’s the raw humanity of the wanted section. Right now in my area, sure, yeah, people want to buy your gold and old phones, and a septic tank, but there are also requests that cut deeper — people looking for things that scintillate with glimmers of their deepest wants. Someone is looking for a blonde female pit bull, because they need a friend that loves them in these trying times. A few people are looking for hairdressers and extensions, because they have hope that soon they’ll be back out in the world, seeing people and being seen by people, and they want to look their best. Several people are looking for the grill for a specific truck, or an arm for a doll because they’re spending some time rebuilding a thing that they love, putting their time and sweat towards a passion project, trying to make at least their own specific world a better place.
Also there’s one real weirdo looking to buy human feces. But if there weren’t, would it really be Craigslist?
Find Jim Hickcox’s films at his website, including Soft Matter and Slow Creep
Follow Split Tooth Media on Twitter and Soundcloud to stay up to date with Cinesthesia
(Split Tooth may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
