Friday, July 30, 2004

For all of our ranting and raving and postulating and sermonizing, gentle reader, we’ve never once discussed the origin of the title “Secondhand Rants.” Ask any three people on the street and they’ll probably give you three different accounts, all of them entertaining and all of them wrong. One man might swear there’s no story to tell, no sir, never has been and never will be. Another woman might look you sadly in the eye, shake her head, and walk away, heartbroken by the story she thought she knew. One boy might run his mouth off a mile a minute, inflating the truth to epic and undeserved proportions.

It’s no Odyssey, let me assure you, though I’m flattered nonetheless. The truth lies, as one of you probably guessed already, somewhere in the middle, and our story continues where it left off. Reviving a tale five months later isn’t the best way to tell a story, I know, but Muse insisted we tell it in the only way possible: in caramel sepia overtones, like glazed nostalgia draped on an old, cracked photo. I’ve never liked nostalgia, but I relented for compromise’s sake. That’s why we waited, let things percolate a bit, and here we are.

I want to go back to the early days, right around the time I left to find Muse. A mysterious crone had given me a blank book for the trip, but in my infinite luck I lost it. To this day I don’t know when or where I lost it. Did it sink with the green yacht? The gold? Did I leave it on the Isle? It took two days before I even realized the book was gone, and by then Muse and I had sailed far away.

People say that relationships always have a honeymoon period, a brief stretch of time when patience runs as deep as it is wide. Maybe that’s why Muse gamely joined me as I sailed back to the Isle, back to the moors, and back again to the Isle in a vain attempt to locate my book. I soon gave up, rationalizing that the pages were empty anyway, and many months passed.

One day, as Muse and I stepped off the boat in the port of Antiquity City, we spied a small pawnshop. It looked horribly out of place, an old brick affair surrounded by glass buildings. I suppose the shop was too antiquated, even for its peers. Inside, amidst a collection of instruments and unloved toys and dusty clothes, I found my book. It looked both new and old. The blank pages were now filled, though you couldn’t really make out the words.

“Perfect timing,” said the shopkeeper, a bookish woman who looked like the classic librarian. “It’s always nice when an item goes back to its original owner.”

“How did you know?” I asked.

“Well, most people pass over the book,” she said, “and the few that pick it up only see blank pages. You don’t see blank pages, right?”

I nodded.

“Here,” she said, retrieving a satchel filled with pens. “You’ll need these as well.”

The shopkeeper, seeing me puzzle over the pens, looked over at Muse.

“She knows what to do with them.”

Muse was thumbing through some positively ancient dresses when she suddenly caught sight of the satchel.

“Oh, those!” she said, making her way over. “Countless others have filled the book to the brim, page by page. If you put the right pen to paper, you’ll reveal their words.”

“But there are thousands of pens!” I protested. “How do I know which one to pick?”

“That’s why you found me,” she replied confidently.

That was that. We paid for the book and the pens (the shopkeeper did take care of them, after all) and left for home.

What you’ve read, what you’re reading, and what you will read, much of it is secondhand. Much of it has been thought or said before. I’m just borrowing words.