While in Chicago, I had a little field trip with the family to the swap meet.
This is the view from the parking lot. You will notice that the mural has pictures of spiders, cactus, skulls, and roosters.
I did not see the first three for sale, but there were chickens in the little pet booth inside.
The swap meet is probably as close as you can get to a third-world marketplace in America.
With a couple hundred vendors on a vast tarmac of pickup trucks and folding tables (and even more in the permanent booths inside the building), it was amazing how little variety in merchandise was at the swap-o-rama. There were lotsa tools, of every possible description. There were socks, DVDs, fruit stands, churrito carts, and kitchen appliances.
And there was a vast amount of porn.
Every stand seemed to have a couple of boxes of porn sitting on the side. $2 each seemed to be the going rate.
There were no books at all. Which was kinda depressing, because that was the only thing I really could have justified fitting into my pitiful allotment of carry-on baggage.
The only things I found that I felt I could put my money down on, were a cock-fighting DVD and a rodeo-injury compilation.
The title of the cock-fighting DVD is "venomous knives of spicy ground" or something like that. It has the look of one of those Indie-media riot-porn compilations: a single shaky consumer-grade video camera, and the extremely literal editing of two roosters cutting themselves to pieces, over and over again. The only thing the producers added to the cockfight was intermittent ear-splitting tejano music.
While watching the cockfighting, I had to turn down the volume, because I didn’t want my housemate to hear the sounds of rooster crows emanating from my room and wonder what the hell I was doing in there.