Vintage

So I was watching this video on youtube from a light bulb collector, “unboxing” a bunch of old fluorescent light bulbs and exclaiming things like “vintage Westinghouse! Made in the USA!”

When I was a kid I sort-of understood the way that a “rare” “collectable” worked is that decades ago it was just a worn-out piece of junk that most people threw away, but somebody kept one in a box for some reason, and now that’s like the last one left and it’s a “collectable,” but now that I am An Old, it’s even weirder, remembering like 1984 and trying to imagine having a shitty light fixture with a shitty bulb that’s fucked up, and getting a new bulb, and instead of throwing the old one away because what the fuck else would you do, instead wrapping it up in newspaper (remember newspaper?) and putting it in a box and keeping it so as to sell it to some “light bulb collector” in forty years who would then video record “unboxing it” in order to “upload” a file like a hundred-thousand-times larger than you can imagine downloading with your Hayes Smartmodem (in four decades that will be nothing!) so other light bulb collectors can admire the burned-out bulb!

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