I think most of us realize we live in a society where you use it up and throw it away. I have a perfectly functional iPhone 3 sitting on my desk beside me that never quite gets its batteries charged. My new (1 year old) iPhone 4 probably doesn't get the fullest of uses as it is. I probably should have sold the 3, or given it to someone who could use it, but I'm comfortably behind the curve. As my wife could get her a 3gs that would outperform my 3 for $50, and have an OS that could be kept up to date, I opted to leave it behind as a toy for jogging music or gaming. In reality it just sits looking forlorn from the corner of my desk. I might still be using it, but the calendaring functionality for work was going to leave me behind unless I upgraded.
I didn't grow up during the depression, but my parents were raised in the aftermath and learned frugality. I guess they passed it on to me, although I don't remember it being emphasized as a core value. I remember tuna fish being too expensive to have every day, it being a favorite meal of mine. I also remember playing a game I made up where I collected the trickle of water from a hose that ran to the floor drain in the basement from the humidifier when the furnace kicked on. I'd save it in old jars (that were too good to throw away) that smelled faintly of pickles and jam, despite the thorough washing. I never got too far, as my mom would eventually find the stash and dump it all out, but it didn't keep me from running to the basement whenever I noticed the heat coming on.
Which brings me to Saturday night and my weekly laundry chore. Sometime in the final load the motor gave out so the spin cycle wouldn't go. The washer isn't too old, slightly pre-dating my marriage of 5 years. With thoughts of the heaping of troubles and technical breakdowns, I sadly proceeded to bed with the sodden load heaped in the machine. I returned to the problem this morning. I've fixed washers and dryers before, and it's usually not something too difficult to troubleshoot. I took off the control panel exposing the electronics and scored the hidden technical sheet. It was only the spin cycle that was failing, so in my mind it had to be a belt or a motor. Pulling off the front of the machine I realized that with the belt intact, the technical advances in washing technology had rendered me impotent in the machine-fixing adventure for today. The spec sheet talked about the transmission and the motor. I broke down and called a couple appliance repair shops and finally found an acceptable deal of a free in-home estimate available in the same day.
The technician was a nice guy and managed to come a couple hours early. I had put everything back in order, so as to not alert him to my monkeying (although it did get that corner of the basement a much-needed cleaning). He quickly opened it up and diagnosed it as the motor. He called for a quote and said there was one available, but that it would be about $370 with the labor. I was somewhat sticker shocked and knew that it was somewhat over half of what I paid for it new. Now I know I'm partially to blame, as in my efforts to finish the laundry and get to bed I often push the load a little heavy, which must have contributed to it's early demise. I don't know what I would have been able to save if I had been able to comfortably diagnose the problem and get a motor, but I don't suppose the labor was too unreasonable. The price was right at the point where I was almost ready to just get a new one, but the frugality kicked in enough that I just had the work done.
It does really kind of chap my hide, built-in planned obsolescence. It's hard to fathom the number of things this year that, through mechanical breakdown or technological eclipsing, we have needed to buy anew. The printer we had for just a couple years had its power supply die, and since it cost less than a day's wages to get a better one, we did. Three of the four ballasts in the lights in the garage with less than two hundred hours usage over the last couple years died in December. My current truck has needed far more in repairs in half the time of my last one, prompting me to wonder if I shouldn't trade it in frequently. The new tv didn't have enough older connections, so we bought a blu-ray player, because it was cheap and did a better job. I know this smacks a lot of First World Problems, and it's true, but it about kills me every time I take something functional (or nearly so) and toss it aside. It's especially painful because I see people who do it more than me without seeming to have a second thought. I'm in a border-line hoarder position, as I'm a tinkerer, and think things like: "The motor and gear system in the scanner on the printer could be really good for some art or automation project!" This has caused me to have a basement full of things that,"just might be good for something".
Debbie has a couple tables that belonged to previous generations in her family. My own grandmother gave me a chair that used to belong to Mrs. Bliss, one of her friends, and I'm hoping to have it reupholstered sometime soon. But I can't really see that I own anything (besides a few pieces of art) that would really be something to be left to a future generation that would be less than ephemeral. My desk is recovered cubicle equipment, my tools cheap Chinese steel and plastic, and now even the books are now largely going to ones and zeroes. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for a time that was never mine, or maybe my frugality has gotten the better of me and I don't acquire heirloom things. I just find the whole concept a bit sad and empty.
I
bet someday the sun won't get up until noon, and it will be all,
"Sorry-Sorry, it won't happen again!" and "I was just a little under the
weather." But we'll know it was out all night in some dive just feeling
sorry for itself and telling the bartender, "I could have been a star."
There's a lesson in that for all of us-- Change jobs more often.
I've had this dream before, or one just like it. And I've had several this month. They're interchangeable, so it doesn't really matter. nothing I can do matters. I can't save the people with me, but really they're all me, and I get to play all their parts, and one of their demises, my demises, sets up the way I win in the end, and I can remember how it ends, I just can't ever get to the ending. So I die and die and die. And one by one there are fewer people in the dream. And I cut, and shoot, and smash the villain and I feel all the damage as if it's done to me, so I guess I'm him too, and maybe that's why I can't die, but I do, just the good parts of me die. One by one. So I run away, but no matter how I try to lose him, and I even get lost myself in all the random turns, I end up always running right towards him. And he always smiles before he kills me.
Tonight I had him. I'd fooled him good and come back towards him running up towards the canoe loaded with the ill-gotten treasure that he'd killed so many for. And I shot an amazing shot with the rifle I'd found in the crawlspace between the flumes that I had dropped when I'd been killed. The shot went true and I heard it plink through the ceramic mask he was wearing in the boat. But as I got around to the side of the kayak I saw it was his son in front, and not him, and I remembered that killing his son makes him mad. He got out the scissors, and I hate the scissors, so I run.
The sets on this one were great, a small island with victorian amenities and mechanics, lots of mechanics. Water flumes and lifts, cannons, silver scissors and blunderbusses. Treasure that one character dies trying to collect, but he... I... explain to me that it's not even valuable, just really neat, right before I get a bullet in the head and the collector dies in front of me in his delay to look at the vintage glass labels eroding in the perpetual, ankle deep torrent. I run from the body still feeling the heat of the blood and bullets splash around me.
The villain's henchmen can die, and they're not me, but they don't die easy and they are endless so I have to slog through that, too. I can even wake up, I just did. But if I don't stay up they're right there below the pillow waiting for me to return, so I don't go back until I can't help it.
I made some resolutions near the start of the year, and I've been thinking about them some as half the year is gone. There's still too much snow on Lone Peak to have ventured up there yet, and with the late spring (and more than a little laziness) I don't know if I'm going to make my running goal. But the one I've been thinking about most this week is my failure so far to increase my writing output. I think a lot of things, but unless they really grab me by the throat and demand to be born, I find it really easy to just push them to the back of my mind where they whither in the dark.
I spent the evening putting up drywall in the garage (at least that resolution is moving along) and came in the house just after sunset, dirty, tired and thirsty. I decided in the absence of an open smoothie shop to just run to the store for something tasty. On the way back I was ambushed by one of those thoughts. It was well into twilight and the streets were dark, but the sky was still shining with that last glimmer of daylight. The air was cool and I drove with the windows down. I just wanted to keep driving aimlessly. There was a little lightning in the distance and it was just one of those nights, the promise of which can get me through a winter. And I remembered countless nights like it, driving alone or with friends. Hanging out and drinking sodas on the trunk of a car and watching the stars come out. All these gilded memories were from so long ago, none of them recent. And I wondered, is it because I was so young that those first experiences were seen with new eyes and had no better memory with which to compare? Is it that I am too shackled to the reality I've molded about myself to actually just cast free and explore and enjoy at the spur of a moment? Or is it that I'm now experienced, and driving aimlessly is not the adventure it once was, and any attempt to replicate the past will only prove a sad counterfeit?
I used to live for summer, especially summer nights, and the rest of the year was torture waiting to get to that point where I could feel like living was actually worth something. And then the years started flying by, and I found that I didn't get what I used to out of the brief season of warmth. At first I thought it was, perhaps, that I finally grew up and spent my summers behind the desk my dad used to tease me about, but the more I think about it the more I'm inclined to say that it is a lack of new. It's so easy to fall into a routine and to accept that every day is going to be much like the last. To fall back into the security of day-to-day duties that eat up the months without much growth. But I think I need to start pushing a boundary here and there. It's not enough to just trade idle downtime for task completion. I am happy things are getting done, but it's time to start living again, as difficult and scary as that may be. Driving aimlessly filled a purpose once, and the memories of those golden times could be fuel enough to get me moving again.
Roughly seven months ago I sat on a Jackson Square curb on a warm late-autumn day in New Orleans. I was killing time before my flight home and it was just one of those moments that was perfect. It struck me that I have those often, and my heart sank as I realized that it was likely that in a few weeks time that memory would be lost with most of it's predecessors. Ironically, that melancholy thought stuck with me, and gave me an anchor to that sunny morning. I only mention this as I was just sitting out in the cool dark of my front porch at 11:30 at night listening to it rain. It was another of those times where, for once, everything about me was still. I could smell the irises, mingling with the smells of the rain and earth. The clouds spread out featurelessly, reflecting the city lights. I thought back to this afternoon's lunch at The Point up on the hill and how I looked down over the city and realized again how small downtown really is. I noticed the grass could use cutting again already and that I ought to make sure the violets get watered more often, because they look so good against the rocks. It struck me as odd that the trees have leafed out so quickly, and yet it doesn't seem as surreal as it feels it should after so long looking at them bare. Maybe because this is the way it's supposed to be. Stan the cat ran up to me as he does whenever he discovers I'm outside. He hadn't bothered to stay out of the rain. He never does. He never worries how uncomfortable it is to have a cat sharing his damp, shedding coat as he insistently crawls across your lap. And it struck me that maybe this is something I'm missing. Maybe I'm only to the point where I can enjoy the rain.
All things being equal, I'd rather be outside--unless there's snow, I've not yet been able to overcome my aversion to cold. But if it's not cold, and I could be anywhere outside, I'd pick the ocean every single time. My parents used to take us to California every few summers to go to Disneyland and/or Sea World and during those weeks we always had a day at the beach. Those were the golden moments of my youth, although you wouldn't know it from the early 8mm movies. The last time I remember visiting the beach with my parents I was almost 16. I remember that day very well. I spent an hour or so standing chest-deep in the troughs of the waves and bobbing up over the top out beyond the breakers. The wave would lift me up off the sand and set me back down, over and over. Near where I was a girl almost my age in a white bikini was doing the same thing. It seems strange to me now that I didn't try to strike up a conversation, or even really make eye contact, knowing more with hindsight what 16-year-old kids are supposed to be like. 
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