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My Profile
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone... - 2009-11-05
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11:26 p.m. - 2008-07-12
It's said the love between opposites is when new the most vulnerable and if enduring the strongest of all loves. For such a love is farcical, it has no reason to be other than being a love that endures for its own sake. There is no hook. No commonality. No shared purpose except that of continuing to love someone who is set at complete odds to oneself. Mick and I have embarked on just such a farce. Where he is bellicose I am peaceful. Where I am a cynic he is a naïf. My diplomacy and slippery charm meets the wall of his blunt straightforwardness and crawls up and spreads over it like a flowering ivy on brick. He's the Stooges and I'm a Python. When we are broke I'm excited and take up the challenge of living well on nothing, Mick just feels trapped and deprived. But nowhere is the difference between us starker than the philosophy of objects. We could not be more apart than vast gulf between our opinions about the purpose of 'things'. The other night Mick was using my computer while I stretched out on our bed with a good movie. (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, not that it matters to this story.) After many amusing adventures Dorothy and Lorelei stood at the altar with the grooms of their dreams and…The End. I had a happy sniffle and then wandered downstairs to see what Mick was up to. I came around the corner of my desk and there was Mick staring at the screen with the most blissed out expression I'd ever seen. Misty eyed Mick turned to me and said, "Baby, look. Isn't it gorgeous? What a find!" He was entranced with THIS. Knowing he's a Beetle man I looked closer wondering why he was drooly over a Ghia. Oh. The mileage. The car was 45 years old and had less than 33,000 miles on it. The Karmann-Ghia was born the same year I was and had been driven a lousy stinking 720 miles for each year we'd both been on the planet. Mick was in raptures over that car. How pristine! How perfect! How unsullied! Oh! Oh! Oh! The wonderfulness of finding something so little used as to be nearly mint! On and on enthused the man who buys things and puts them away unopened to sit in dark closets and lidded boxes never again to see the light of day and certainly never ever ever to be removed from the packaging and used. Somewhere along his praise fest my guy twigged I was less than thrilled with that Ghia. In fact I was nearly in tears. Perplexed he asked, "Baby, what is it?" I gulped a few times to get the words past the lump in my throat and burst out, "What a terrible thing to do to the car! That sucks! I wouldn't have that car if you paid me! Imagine sitting in it and feeling all that…that…nothing! No life! Nobody ever made out in that car! It never brought a new baby home from the hospital. It never set off across country with two young people looking to start their new lives! No adventure. No thrills. Not even a trip to the goddamn ice cream stand. YUCK! My whole life that poor car has known nothing but sitting in a garage year after year after year. And for what? So some jerk with lots of money and no heart can buy it and stick it in yet another garage to sit and do nothing for another 45 years! Blech! Puh-tooey! Shit on that!" Knocked back by my vehemence Mick stuttered out some lame crap about why unearthing that Ghia was a good thing. It's rarity. It set a new standard for excellence. To collectors… "Collectors!" I spat. "Screw collectors. What have collectors ever done but hoard things and waste them? What hell good is something that is never used? That never fulfills its potential? Is never loved???" Mick made the Lurch noise and shook his head at me. He guessed I'd never 'get' what the deal was with collecting. He's right.
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