Hoarding vs. Collecting

I wrote this piece as a guest post for a fellow blogger Wilma, whose blog has the morbid but highly entertaining name Death Bed Moment. This was part of a guest post offer I rashly made on Twitter one afternoon: you pick the topic, I’ll write some words on it. Any topic will do.

Wilma’s topic of choice: Hoarding vs. Collecting. Since all my collecting looks like hoarding, I felt that I was uniquely unqualified to contribute. And then I did it anyway.

Sometimes I wonder – particularly when I’m standing around in my spare room, mentally organizing the profound mess piled up in there – what difference exists between hoarding and collecting. Then I watch late night television, and as usual, it gives me the answers.

The ad for the $50 Gold Buffalo Tribute Proof will tell you everything you need to know about what separates hoarders from collectors. It’s all in the language. Listen to the ad and you will hear the words:  first; pure; famous; popular; American; iconic; stunning relief; masterpiece; through the roof; reserve;  strict limit; hurry.

That’s four nines!

Just so we’re clear: the $50 Gold Buffalo Tribute Proof is not fifty dollars (it’s nine ninety five). It’s also not the original gold coin; it’s a tribute to a coin that collectors love. It’s not even legal tender. And the gold of the tribute is an electroplate. You’d be buying less than a dollar’s worth of gold, even with gold prices “skyrocketing,” as they say here. It’s a pretty cheap substitute for an actual gold American Buffalo nickel. But there are bound to be a few souls out there with a hunger that can only be named and appeased by one of these cheapo mail-order coins.

It’s the words that give it the aura, that sense of value (but note that the word ‘value’ never appears in the ad). That’s part of what makes it a collectible (even though no serious collector would pay attention to this piece).

Once acquired, a collectible object behaves differently in the household than an ordinary object. The collectible is often given pride of place and is put on display. Unavoidably, the collectible organizes the space around it, so that nearby objects seem to orient themselves around it. Or it goes in a special case, which is then locked away. Whether it’s on display or hidden from sight, the collectible is all about order.

Hoarding is a different situation altogether. The impulse to hoard is like the ideal behind the collectible uncoupled from its socket and spraying all over the place; suddenly, every object becomes vitally important, a thing that holds a memory or an idea or some possibility. Or maybe there’s something shameful attached to the endless acquisition of things, so that closets are packed with boxes of unworn shoes, or albums of clipped coupons merge with piles of flyers, which in turn merge with papers and magazines.

When everything has value, nothing has value. The hoarded items gather dust, become invisible to the hoarder. The filth piles up, and one day you’re a bleary-eyed weirdo pushing your way through narrow paths between ceiling-high hedges of old newspapers and grocery bags. If there was anything of value or real use in there, you’ve hidden it away in a wordless midden heap of stuff. Don’t go doing that, please. It’s weird.

Predicting the future

[Night. The distaff side of time. Stray dogs crouching in the bushes, the moon bellied out like a spinnaker at the prow of the dark sky. You get the idea. Schmutzie and Palinode are in bed.]

Palinode: Something just occurred to me.

Schmutzie: What’s that?

Palinode: I’ve figured out how to predict the future.

Schmutzie: You do not know how to predict the future.

Palinode: Totally. I’ve got it cased.

Schmutzie: Prove it.

Palinode: On July 23, 2012, I will receive a present.

Schmutzie: Of course you will. That’s your birthday.

Palinode: And when will that birthday happen?

Schmutzie: …

Palinode: That’s right. In the future. Quod erat BOOYAH.

Schmutzie: I thought of the best present for you the other day.

Palinode: Really? What was it?

Schmutzie: Well you’re not getting it now.

Hubris

This post originally (like, today originally) as a guest post on Cenobyte’s blog. I’m cross-posting it here because my blog is hungry.

Hubris

By Aidan Morgan
Delivered to Mrs. Collicutt’s class, 1980

Hello everyone. I am so glad to see you all here today. For my presentation Mrs. Collicutt asked me to pick a word to talk about so I am here to tell you about hubris. What is hubris? The dictionary defines hubris as the act of bringing shame to someone. To use the word in a sentence, I could say “Dwayne showed hubris when he threw dog poop at me last week during recess,” but that sounds weird. My dad says that hubris is when people show too much arrow gins. Gin is a kind of liquor, so I guess that hubris is for people who drink a lot or show off their collection of gin to everyone. But I wasn’t sure what arrow gins was exactly, so I asked dad for an example but he told me to talk to my Aunt Jane. But I’ve never seen any gin at Aunt Jane’s place. She doesn’t have any liquor at all, or even a television. And all the furniture in her living room is covered in plastic, and no one is allowed to go in there. Why did she buy a house with a living room if she didn’t want to go in there ever? Maybe she keeps all her gin in there.

What is an example of hubris in my own life? Here is one. This story has my Aunt Jane in it too. Over Christmas time she took me to the Science Centre to look at the animals and see the guy do the dry ice demonstration and they had a whole exhibit on evil lution. Aunt Jane said they had too much hubris and that mankind should remember where it came from. She also said she didn’t pay twenty dollars to have her intelligence insulted with evil lution. She took me home right after and dad was asleep on the couch and not doing anything but he got mad anyway because aunt Jane was supposed to take me out for supper as well and couldn’t he get just one day to himself and then I asked him why evil lution was hubris and he started shouting at Aunt Jane to keep her opinions to herself and then mom came from upstairs and she didn’t have her makeup on and she started shouting at dad to stop picking on her sister and dad told her she looked ugly with no makeup on and then mom threw a vase at dad and Aunt Jane left with me and now I’m staying at her house for a few days. Tonight I’m going to sneak into the living room and see if I can find her gin. Well that was my presentation and thank you very much for listening. I hope you don’t think I had any hubris in my talk.

A Round-up of Some Recent Palinode

photo credit: Darrol Hofmeister for prairie dog magazine

Time never stops. And neither does the small stream of random bits and pieces that come slipping downstream and end up in the little eddy that is this site. Here’s a little bit of stuff I’ve written on the internet that’s appeared recently.

From InsertEyeroll.com:

Bruce Springsteen Shocks Audience By Revealing He’s Alive

“I guess I’m a little surprised,” said long time fan Ellie Carou after the concert. “Springsteen is my favorite musician of all time. And I went through a real grieving period back when I thought he was dead.”

Carou is only one of thousands of fans who were convinced that Springsteen had been dead for at least a decade.

“I seriously thought The Rising was a compilation album,” Carou said. “I mean, it sort of sounded like a bunch of B-sides from the ’80s.”

From prairiedogmag.com:

What I Ate: My Year of Food

THE SADDEST GOODBYE OF THE YEAR In the winter of 1989, when I was new to Saskatchewan winters and even dumber than I am now, I slipped on my desert boots and went for a walk. Thirty minutes later, I teetered into the Novia Café on frozen, screaming feet and thawed out with a cup of dishwater coffee. I watched old women with voluminous hair and deadly fingernails suck on cigarettes and leave lipstick-stained filters upright in glass ashtrays. The walls were stained with years of smoke and the bathrooms were tiny and terrifying. I decided that this was the greatest place in Regina, with the possible exception of the courtyard at the Quality Tea Room.

Over the years the Novia changed owners, underwent some major renovations to look more like a classic post-war diner, and for a brief, glorious period it served the best fish and chips in town. And then it closed after 93 years. In a city that’s barely passed the century mark, that’s a pretty amazing run.

You Have To See This: Fusion Hero Review

Whatever your taste in food, you should visit Fusion Hero at least once, just to look at the place. The exterior is unassuming strip mall frontage next to a Subway Restaurant, but once inside, you’re plunged into a vast black warehouse of design ideas, a hypnagogic dream of a restaurant that jumbles a lifetime’s worth of Asian dining experiences into one laquer-and-glass whole.

The Pulled Pork Survey

I don’t feel like writing a set up to this story, so let’s just skip to the part where I got invited to participate in a survey to gauge my reaction to a fast food chain’s BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich (a teacher of mine once claimed that all songs have a few introductory bars to set the tone and tempo, but there’s no way to introduce a pork sandwich survey). Just to aid in the telling of this story, here is a grossly exaggerated and sexually misguided picture of a woman eating a sub.

Online surveys have become ubiquitous at franchises and chain restaurants these days. It’s hard to take a sip of water without being offered a QR code or a special numeric key to feed into your smart phone so you can rate the service or the thirst quenchingness of your beverage. In return for a few minutes of your time and a surprising quantity of personal information, you’ll get a free cookie. Or a coupon, mailed to you in six to eight weeks’ time, for $10 dollars off your next entrée with purchase of other entrée. Goodie.

Nonetheless, I had a sizeable amount of work this afternoon that I didn’t want to do, and telling my computer about my sandwich seemed like a great way to put it off for a few more minutes.* Fritter your days away with surveys and focus groups, people. At least it’s not Facebook.

I hadn’t anticipated the seriousness of the online survey. When I typed the URL into my address bar, a page came up with the stern reminder that I would not qualify for the survey unless I had, in fact, purchased and eaten the BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich in question. Good thing, too. Imagine all the cheese sandwich and profiterole people who would otherwise throng the site with their irrelevant experience.

Once I logged in, though, the site still wasn’t satisfied that I had the BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich authority I claimed. “Did you, yourself, eat the BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich?” it asked me, with a kind of doggedness not seen since the demise of the Stasi. I clicked my assent. It asked me whether the sandwich was toasted - unfortunately, there were no options marked “Duh” or “No, because I hate it when my sandwich tastes good,” so I clicked Yes once more. Then it asked me to quantify what exactly I’d eaten on my BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich. Had there been pulled pork? How about BBQ sauce?

I was about to walk back to the restaurant and tell them to stop giving me survey cards, when I realized that the questions were surprisingly relevant. I’d refused the offer of BBQ sauce, since that stuff is mostly sugar suspended in a matrix of other sugar. I realized that the survey was right to question the basic substance of what I’d eaten, right down to the elements that gave the sandwich its ontological grounding. I expected the next question to demand proof that I existed apart from the sandwich. And since I’d just finished eating the thing, I wasn’t sure that I could furnish said proof.

After a few more questions about my sandwich, the survey switched to the ‘classification’ section. Those are the questions that drill down into your income and education, and generally make you feel like you’re underqualified to answer questions about a sandwich. The clincher came on the last page, when it turned out that I needed to give my name, phone number and address in order to claim my $5 certificate and complete the survey. Which would be mailed to me, instead of, say, printed out right then and there. And since the survey didn’t furnish its interface with a ‘back’ button, I couldn’t opt out of any of the income/education info that I’d provided. No thank you.

And that’s how I ended up not waiting around for six to eight weeks for my $5 gift certificate to a fast food restaurant. If you can explain to me why I wrote all this down in the middle of the night on my blog, feel free to explain it to me.

*The views expressed on my blog do not reflect those of my employers. It’s their position that I should do the work they give me.