Earlier this year, I was thumbing through Facebook Marketplace when I came across a “fire piano” for sale. I clicked the listing expecting that “fire” meant “cool,” but found something far more literal: a pyrotechnic piano, MacGyvered to spit flames from its top whenever a player tickled the keys.
In the brief description that accompanied the post, the California-based seller recounted how he had been hand-building the piece until “an injury took him out of the shop.” He was now asking $2,000 for the piano, which he considered 90 percent complete. That this artist was thwarted from realizing his freaky vision left me both astonished and strangely melancholy. I spent the rest of that night wondering if he grew up tinkering with pianos, and if he missed the process of making them. For a moment I even considered asking him what this remarkable piece would look like if he’d seen it through.
I’ve been parsing other people’s wares since before Facebook Marketplace debuted in 2016. I often venture to Los Angeles flea markets, thrift shops and swap meets tucked away in high school parking lots, drive-in movie theaters and enigmatic storefronts. I’ll stop by estate sales on weekends to comb through things like chess-piece-molding kits from the 1970s and miniature cocktail shakers. I’m more drawn to the aura surrounding these objects, and the stories I imagine they might tell, than I am the objects themselves. An afternoon spent roaming an estate sale nurtures my curiosity about the items that make a life, what retains significance as time flickers by and what people choose to let go of as their surroundings change and they do, too.
A similar impulse took me to Facebook Marketplace, yet to call it a digital thrift shop underplays how unique and bizarre the platform is. Facebook proper isn’t the best prism through which to consider someone’s existence, but its Marketplace application still yields surprises rather than serving up — or, at least, only serving up — algorithmic slop. It provides me with the stories I can imagine only when I’m browsing through shops. Marketplace is distinct in that these oddities aren’t typically divorced from their contexts: The sellers’ descriptions can range from explaining, say, what brought 68 pairs of salt and pepper shakers into their lives, or why they were parting with an action figure of a random jacked guy (the seller apparently thought the toy was Dwayne [the Rock] Johnson when he bought it).
The ephemera populating Facebook Marketplace has transformed a corner of the network into a locus of awe, perhaps even delight. In this way, my habit of scrolling through Facebook Marketplace isn’t just an enhancement of the in-person thrifting experience. To gaze upon its fundamental weirdness is almost a form of time travel, a callback to the whimsy that defined the Web 1.0 era. These quirky offerings are the sorts of things you would expect from a place like Stumbleupon — a bygone site from the internet of yore featuring a button that, when clicked, took you to a random website. The items on Facebook Marketplace are jumbled together so haphazardly that they remind me of the lawless tumble of images that graced GeoCities’ pages.
As a millennial who recalls how fun the nascent internet could be, it’s a relief to find something that feels reminiscent of that time. It serves me such strange juxtapositions as a stunning midcentury amber glass “swag lamp” to immediately follow a “unique wallet” featuring pleather wrinkles forming a terrifying face. This anarchic display is like gazing into someone’s hallway closet rammed with tchotchkes they couldn’t find another place for. It’s precisely where slivers of humanity emerge.
In one listing, a seller was getting rid of chic lamps, couches, lounge chairs and a dining table amid an ongoing divorce. In the caption he explained needing to “sell everything off and split the proceeds.” “All items are in great shape and have been well taken care of,” he went on. “Be kind, it’s been hard.” Another listing, featuring a baseball cap emblazoned with the words “Shit Show Supervisor,” was described as a gift from the seller’s son: “Single parenting at its finest.” (As if to ward off any depressing implications, he reassured potential buyers that the hat was a fun one.) Listings like these have made me consider how items can become charged with memories we cherish, however difficult they were at the time we were experiencing them; and how giving up these objects can feel like mourning parts of ourselves that we are forced to dilute or leave behind.
By staring into this cabinet of chaos, I’ve learned about the bizarre objects that make up a life. I’ve tumbled down the rabbit hole of obsolete furnishings, like gossip chairs. But these dives have mostly made me sit with the reality that, because of limited money or space, or personal disagreements, we must sometimes give up things we cherish — but those items’ significance can at least be passed on to someone else.
I’ve ended up buying just two items from Facebook Marketplace: a marble coffee table and a plush recliner. But purchasing items there is almost beside the point. It turns out that I don’t really want to buy a cheeseburger-shaped lamp. I do, however, want to know about the life of the person who, at one point, couldn’t live without that lamp.