Ephemeral
June 7, 2008
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Be Careful, Or We’re All Toast
June 6, 2008
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I adore these here Intertubes.
As a repository for minutiae, it can’t be beat. There’s nothing so mundane that you can’t find someone cataloging and footnoting it. I’m more interested in the ebb and flow of everyday life than I am in what are considered important things by many. I am amused from time to time when I see people who are monomaniacs about politics shocked and disgusted that many people don’t know the names of their elected representatives. I take it as a kind of inverse barometer. Everybody in the USSR knew Joe Stalin’s name.
Could there be a better example of a digital mound of minutiae than the Cyber Toaster Museum? It’s a magnificent compendium of ennui-chasing pictures of the most ubiquitous household appliances ever. They gamely monetize the whole affair in just the right way, offering a sort of pinup calendar that appeals to the inner Elwood Blues Brother in all of us. Hot.
They have photos of the real items, of course, and interesting scans of advertisements and so forth. I’m particularly taken with this one:
That’s the very one we had on our kitchen table when I was a boy. It was already ancient when I was using it, but that’s it. The little rotary knob to adjust how dark the toast came out would come off in your hand every time you turned it, and the handle on ours had the corner of it knocked off, likely by someone holding a black piece of toast in one hand and the knob in the other one too many times.
Look at the price. $23. We don’t have a toaster anymore, because you can make toast in other appliances. But if you wanted to buy one, you could get one for fifteen bucks or so. Hell, you could by an actual Toastmaster toaster for twenty-eight bucks right now.
We were not rich when I was a kid. My mother would mix sugar and cinnamon together, and put it back in the used teddy-bear shaker the cinnamon came in, and we’d have toast with butter with that on it, and a glass of milk for breakfast. Upon reflection, it seems that our ration of toast was a way to use bread that had the stiffness of toast already instead of throwing it away. We never threw anything away. Even twenty-five years after my parents bought that toaster, or more likely had it given to them as a much-needed and unaffordable luxury, twenty-five bucks was half a day’s pay for my mother, who was supporting us when she wasn’t telling us to eat our toast.
I am profligate compared to my parents, and compared to their parents I’m downright monetarily licentious. I wonder what would have gone through my mother’s mind if the toaster had stopped working back then. A new toaster would be an extra car payment today. No joke.
I think of all the various schemes that some would offer to make sure you’d always have a toaster, or a job making toasters. Rationing. Price controls. Trade barriers. Hell, maybe the thing’s carbon footprint is too large and should be made illegal. My grandparents came to Massachusetts back when the Know-Nothing party ran the place and thought we shouldn’t even be allowed to eat toast on this continent. Lots of people have lots of opinions about the fairness of something as mundane as the toast.
I’m just grateful, is all, for the The Cyber Toaster Museum, who reminded me how much better off I am not only than my parents and other ancestors, but how much better off I am now than I was myself when I was young. I’m grateful for reminding me how much people used to do without, and how hard people used to work to achieve even the simplest kind of ease in their lives. I think of how hard, without complaint, my parents worked to try to just raise us to adulthood with real deprivation right over their shoulder the whole time.
You’re never going to hear that on the news. It’s so much more scintillating to say the world will end tomorrow, after all. Good news? Progress? Some perspective? It’s there, in the toaster, if you’ll just look for it.
It’s Tommy Walnuts
June 5, 2008
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I don’t know how many times I trudged up that hill with his lunch. Mother said he was kind to us when we needed it, so we need to look after him now that’s he’s alone. Me, I just do what I’m told.
I didn’t know what to call him. He looked even older than he was, and he was nothing and nobody to me. He sensed it. He seemed to know everything although he never went out.
“Everyone calls me Tommy Walnuts.”
OK, then. I’d sit in the milky sunshine next to the cobwebby window and watch him eat, while the cats – his cats?- the cats did figure eights through his legs. In all the time I was ever there I never saw him show the slightest interest in those creatures, but they hung by him like he was their mother. It was like he was the sun they orbited.
He never spoke while he ate. He’d murmur or grunt if you asked him a question, but shoot you a sort of withering look that made you refrain from asking another. When he was done, he’d take out a tin of tobacco and make himself a cigarette, and he’d smoke and he’d turn his eye towards yours, and it was like a signal that you could ask him something. He never asked me anything, except: How is your mother?
I can’t explain what that man knew, because he seemed to know everything. I’d go to school and the nuns would try to pound the numbers and the words and some sense into my head. It took a lot of hammering; at least at first. But then I had a mission. I wanted to ask this man something he did not know. I’d read at recess and at home and I’d sit in the library like a girl and scan the pages looking for the thing Tommy Walnuts would not know. I couldn’t find it.
How long is the Great Wall of China? How do you calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle? Who was the third vice-president of the United States? Did you know the Titanic had a sister ship?
“Two,” he said, and send me home to scour the shelves again.
One day he looked rough. He always looked old and beat, but he seemed sick. He coughed a lot when he smoked.
“Are you all right?”
“I am always the same. Makes no difference. Ask your questions.”
“How did you end up all alone here?”
He took a long drag on the cigarette. He looked around the empty room like a man on a stage surveying the audience before delivering his line. It was the first time he had ever even paused before answering me. I heard the clock tick, and the soft indistinct sound of a cat purring under his chair. A car sizzled past on the wet pavement outside.
He looked at me differently than before. I was sorry I had asked that. I’d gone too far. I was losing so I upset the board.
“I’m not alone. You are here.”
Tommy Walnuts knew everything.
Excitement Is Not Contentment
June 4, 2008
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My little son skips when he is going nowhere.
He sings when he washes his hands.
He performs an extemporaneous opera while stacking blocks.
He is not afraid of wild animals, only the vacuum cleaner.
He plays his brother’s video games and just walks through the virtual rooms and opens the doors.
He solemnly gives his mother a dandelion.
McElligot’s Pool is not Horton Hears a Who, Daddy.
When asked his father’s full name, he gives it, but appends “Daddy” to the front of it.
It’s the broken toys he wants.
He wakes up in the same pose he went to sleep in.
He is excited to be him. I am content to be his Father.
Hey, It’s Curtis Mayfield’s Birthday!
June 3, 2008
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(Curtis Mayfield, June 3rd, 1942 – December 26th 1999)
I was a child in the sixties, a teenager in the seventies. The natural trajectory for a young man in the suburbs would be to embrace rock music. I never really did.
They were too much like me, perhaps, the arena power chorders. Aerosmith used to play in my high school gym, after all. I wouldn’t change the channel if Bachman Turner Overdrive came on, and I had a well worn copy of Frampton Comes Alive, just like everybody else, but that was about it.
There was a jukebox in the lunchroom at our public high school. It was a revelation to me after spending my grammar school years in Catholic School. The nuns would have no more brought in a juke box than a Wiccan into our lunchroom. Upon reflection, it’s the nuns that got it right. It was a symptom of the profound unseriousness of the place that the public high school supplied the same soundtrack a teenager demanded in his non-school life to muddle through it.
I could probably list every single song in that jukebox, down to the most obscure, and it was over thirty years ago. Not much of it was very good. But it was generally fun and disposable, like popular entertainment should be, but rarely is, any more. There was:
Led Zeppelin
Harry Nilsson
Dr John
Hollies
Beatles
Rolling Stones
Eric Clapton
The Beach Boys
Badfinger
Moody Blues
More Led Zeppelin
Grand Funk Railroad
Elton John
Wings
Billy Paul
Billy Preston
Earth Wind and Fire
Still more Led Zeppelin
Gilbert O’Sullivan
Looking Glass
Marvin Gaye
Aerosmith
The Rasberries…
Well, you get the picture. Nothing much recorded at La Scala. Nothing much recorded in a gospel church. Now having enough money to put into a jukebox was a foreign concept to me. The thing would play anyway, and you’d hear everyhing in it no matter what, eventually. I recall the only time an insurrection against the thing was mounted, when some wisenheimer pumped a buck or two into the thing and selected “Dogs Barking Christmas Carols” 15 straight times. After about five minutes, a grim and resolute shop teacher marched over, pulled the enormous contraption away from the wall, and yanked the plug. I’m certain it’s the only cheer the prickly old fellow ever heard from his charges.
This one comes back to me though, and kindly:
The man, and the topic, was a world away from me. I was unlikely to adopt his huggybear/trotsky cap or his owlish glasses. But really, to a fifteen year old, looking into a world of dead ends, who could say it better, and funkier, than Curtis Mayfield?
Ask him his dream
What does it mean?
He wouldn’t know…
Month: June 2008
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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