Buying, selling and best of all, bartering on ‘The List’

They say the first step on the road to recovery is admitting you have a problem. To that end, let me confess, I have a little Craig's List problem.

By little, I mean I think about Craig's List, a lot, perhaps a touch more than I should. Not to the degree that, say the average 16-year-old boy thinks about girls; more to the degree the average 45-year-old boy thinks about girls, which is still a lot. An awful lot.

I realize that by writing this column I may be spreading my troubles to the general populace. There are no doubt a few of you out there who have yet to discover Craig's List and in reading this may be driven to develop your very own nasty habit. To that I say, good. Misery loves company, plus you might just have some stuff I need.

For the uninitiated, Craig's List is what the cool kids call a peer-to-peer shopping site. In English, that means it's an online garage sale. If, for example, I have a large pool filter and an industrial-grade saw sharpener lying about the garage (don't ask) and wish to unload them, I can post the items with a couple of photos to Craig's List and a fellow in Celina with a dirty pool and dull blades will come and take them away. It doesn't have to be a fellow from Celina, but in my experience it almost always is.

I first discovered "The List" a year or so ago, but it's just been the last month or so that it's become a bit of an addiction. I find myself checking the site first thing in the morning, last ting at night and a half-dozen times in between.

I have an order of things, starting with the books and businesses and working my way down to motorcycles and musical instruments. Occasionally I open an ad to look at the details or pictures. I've yet to actually buy anything.

In reality, Craig's List offers nothing more than the classifieds in this very paper and, out of loyalty to the folks who sign my paycheck, I will say it is a far less effective means of actually selling items. But I'm not there as a seller or a buyer, I'm there as a voyeur.

Craig's List offers a constantly changing world of opportunity, piles and piles of stuff you have no idea you need until you see it for sale. By looking at a single category I could buy a John Deere mower, red-elm logs and a registered Boer goat, all within 30 miles of Lima. Surf over to the farm-and-garden category and I find a slate pool table, an Ohio State futon and $20 duck decoys all in a row. And yes, they would look lovely in my living room. I'll tell the wife you said so.

Even better than the things for sale are the opportunities to barter. One day it's a guy willing to trade professional photography service for flooring. The next day it's someone hoping to exchange his used tires for a Maltese.

For the creative, the list reads like an impossible romance, the tale of most unlikely if not impossible couplings. One poor fellow has been trying for weeks to trade his solar blimp for five Morgan silver dollars. I can only imagine the hope in his heart as he checks his e-mail each day longing for a response, and the kindred soul sitting across town and dreaming of solar-powered, remote-controlled adventures who suddenly discovers that the five Morgans eccentric Uncle Leo left him in the will can purchase his odd, odd dream.

That's not to say there isn't legitimate business being done on the list. I myself managed to sell a used rototiller and came very close to trading my old computer to a guy who said he could patch my ceiling. I was just two giga-somethings away from picture-perfect popcorn.

It's not what I can get out of Craig's List that draws me to it. It's not the selling or the buying or even the trading that has me hooked, it's the window it opens on the small, petty and immaterial doings of the day. In this world there are wars, political fights and $4 gas. In Craig's world there is a guy hoping to trade a lightly used sump pump for some stump grinding. We all need a little escape some time. This is mine.

Besides, you never know when you'll need an extra sump pump.