In a bygone era of this blog, posts were produced at a prodigious, almost obsessive pace, and I felt duty-bound to furnish you with words on the promised days. Missing a day would bring about a deep, abiding sense of guilt, followed by furtive assembly of backdated posts–a dishonest exercise, to be sure, and also ridiculous to think I actually had the drive to do so. This makes it all the more ironic that Tuesday’s post–or lack thereof–was a genuine malfunction on my part, the first ever such mistake in our history. I hit the “save” button instead of “publish.” Honest! Honest. I only wish I had the wherewithal to backpost these days.
Tuesday’s up now, something about pool or the like, but I don’t want to talk about that tonight. Instead, I want to talk about things breaking. I know nothing lasts forever, but it’s one of those truisms I shunt to the back of my head until absolutely needed. I’ve been reminded of this fact more and more recently–looking at the odometer every morning, for instance, or the peeling rubber around my rearview window. The small surface crack in the tub. The kitchen sink handle that loosens on its own accord and drips water.
All these things point to the inexorable march of time. YouTube has become the de facto repository of how-to knowledge, and so I dutifully fired up a video on how to tighten single Moen kitchen handles, part one. I couldn’t even finish the clip. Stopped right around the time the presenter laid out all the tools the project would need. That’s because I knew exactly what course of action I’d take: nothing. You remember how in old cartoons, a pilot would fly so vigorously that the flight stick would break? And then, all the pilot had to do was jam the stick back into the console to right the plane again? That’s how I’ve been prolonging the life of my kitchen sink handle, in effect, twisting its base until it feels new, again and again, cataclysm inching ever closer with each clockwise turn.
My billiards prowess currently resides somewhere between a) trying super-hard to not tear the felt and b) remembering to chalk up on occasion. With only two sessions under my belt, I suppose I can’t expect much, but the frustration, the loathsome burden of being a novice, is there. I’m already wrestling with this feeling vis-à-vis the other four-lettered word, g*lf, and I don’t know if I have the mental capacity to tackle both.
There was an unintentional side benefit of pool, though, and it manifested itself in a moment of total clarity, right around the fifth or sixth time I scratched. A huge component of the game is knowing where the ball will land after it completes its primary task. Duh, right? But to me, this was revelatory. I had been so preoccupied with making contact that I failed to think beyond the initial impact of the cue ball, and I wished this shortsightedness began and ended at the table.
It doesn’t, unfortunately. I realized I don’t think beyond the next thing, the next task, and this has been going on for, what, months now? Years, perhaps? It’s like I’ve bred myself into a kind of corporate horse, blinders ever at the ready, the warm blanket of routine draped comfortably across my rump. This simply won’t do. I need to shake off the cobwebs, and I’m looking to chess for answers. It’s strange, adulthood. There was a time when I’d give anything to avoid a gathering of chess players. Now, I need to find them.
Had the better, more sensible angels of my nature not intervened last Friday, I would’ve saddled myself with a $500 bet on yet another Kickstarter project. That’s what it is, after all–a wager that the project creator will follow through and actually deliver a product. My first bet was decidedly underwhelming, a wallet masquerading as a “small, sad piece of elastic.” The second bet I placed–on another wallet, incidentally, for $24–turned out to be a small, sad piece of neoprene with a hole cut into its side, and the irony was not lost on me.
But still I persist, with six projects in tow, the latest being $20 invested in a potential future of never having to tie my shoes again. It won’t be the last time I spend money on Kickstater, either, and I say this unapologetically. This hoodie, for instance, was like catnip to me, and I don’t even wear hoodies. No, it’s the idea that’s so alluring.
It goes beyond wallets and laces and hoodies. It’s my small retort to the devils within and without–my reply to outsourcing and offshoring, my answer to the modern tapestry of reality television, fast food, and vapid news cycles. These projects hearken back to a time before all this. They evoke the frontier and a reclamation of good ol’ American ingenuity. Or perhaps I’m deluding myself and touching the stove not once, not twice, but six or seven times. There may even be a stove designed on Kickstarter to be touched eight times, in which case I’ve likely backed it already.