About 9 months ago, the shutter curtain on my Leica M6 jammed up. It was damned unfortunate, and kind of infuriating, given that a Leica M body typically lasts decades with very little in the way of maintenance requirements.

Around that same time, Michele let me use her Nikon D200 for a bit. It piqued my curiosity enough to purchase one, along with a 17-55/2.8 Nikon DX lens.

Recently, I realized that, with my Leica broken and my new camera being roughly the size of a cinder block, I’d all but stopped with the photography hobby. I never carried the Nikon with me. It was too large, too loud, and too fiddly.

Early hints at my distaste for the beast could be gleaned from an article I wrote for JPG Magazine.

Last week, I sold my Nikon and shipped the Leica to Don Goldberg for a repair and once-over. And yesterday, my precious little Leica was returned to me.

The new shutter mechanism is amazingly smooth. It’s much nicer than it was before, and I imagine it will last me a long time.

An interesting note is that my enthusiasm for photography returned no more than an hour after having sold the dSLR. I can’t quite explain this, other than with an assumption that this hobby, for me, is a romantic thing and that at least some of that romance revolves around film and the analog process. Who knows?

Lately, I’ve been flooding Craigslist, posting many of my toys for sale. In my manic desire to scrape up half of one percent of the trillion dollars required for a down payment in the greater NYC area, I’ve decided that sacrificing gadgets and gizmos is just and noble.

Thus far, I’ve sold off a beautiful Nikon 17-55/2.8 DX lens.

Also on the chopping block are:

• My restored 1979 Vespa P200E
• My Nikon D200

Unposted items are:

• My insanely amazing custom Tim Scruggs pool cue
• My Dual 867 G4 and 17” Cinema Display
• Quite possibly, my Liberty LO100 biscuit-cone resonator (think Dobro)
• Very possibly, my Konica Minolta DiMAGE 5400 II 35mm film/slide scanner

Who knows what else I’ll dig out.

The point of this post is not only to take inventory (and to get a bit more attention on these items), but to point out that, should each item sell for its asking price, I’ll have added only $7200 towards the cause. That’s 1/10th the price of a down payment for a decent house in Jersey.

One tenth.

Ten percent.

Ten percent of twenty percent of a house.

Some folks say you are a ‘real’ New Yorker the day you start talking endlessly about getting out of the city.

I’m the mayor of this motherfucker. I’m the Statue of Liberty.

ADDED I decided against selling the scanner. The cue, I’m sending off to Tim Scruggs for a refinish and rewrap. I sold the G4.