…from our old friend, Bill:
(This has been making the rounds for a couple of weeks, but I finally took a minute to watch it just this morning. Pretty funny, I thought, but a legitimate point. These fryer things can be dangerous. So if you’ve got a hankering for deep-fried anything today, be careful. Have a happy — and safe — Thanksgiving, everyone!)
I was just rummaging in the basement as part of the “reclaiming my space” project I mentioned yesterday when I ran across a galvanized tin box, one those things in which you keep recipes and index cards and old photos. I didn’t recognize it, but it was in a deposit of my stuff from around fourth or fifth grade, so it had obviously had some significance to me at some point. From its weight, I could tell there was something inside, so I swung the lid back and found… the weirdest assemblage of random stuff. A small rectangular mirror. A couple of ball bearings. A decorative bolt from the front of my childhood dresser. The slide from my old Cub Scouts neckerchief. A couple of AA batteries, stashed away god-knows how long ago, now rotted out and leaking white acidic powder. A miniature replica coin in a sleeve marked “A little money from Continental Bank.”
And something that made me grin like a damn fool: a ticket stub from — get this — The Dark Crystal.
To be honest, there are times when I feel very awkward about still living in the same house where I grew up. And then there are times when I want to go up to people and say, “hey, when was the last time you found a ticket stub from a movie you saw when you were twelve?”
Well, it was bound to happen eventually… the fabled Bennion Archive has finally outgrown its physical domain and I’ve had to make the difficult decision to start letting things go for the sake of reclaiming my modest living space. I’ve actually been in the process of that for over a year now, quietly selling off books and other small items on Amazon Marketplace (go here if you’d like to peruse what I’ve currently got in the inventory). I’ve had some degree of success with that, but I’ve also found that Amazon isn’t always the best option, depending on what exactly you’re trying to sell. So I’m exploring some other venues, including the direct approach, i.e., pitching certain items to my Loyal Readers here on Simple Tricks and Nonsense. I hope you’ll forgive me for going commercial on you; I promise the items I mention here will be things I think may be of interest to my audience, and I promise as well not to do it very often.
So, that said, the first item up in the Giant Liquidation Sale is an 11-volume set of books comprising the complete Diary of Samuel Pepys. (That’s pronounced “peeps,” for you non-English majors out there.)
If you’re not familiar with Pepys, he’s a pretty fascinating guy. I first discovered him and his famous diary in a college course on the English Restoration, the time period immediately after the British monarchy regained control from the Cromwells. It was an exciting, high-spirited time in Britain following several decades of Puritan repression. Theaters were reopened (the Puritans had had them shuttered), and the immensely popular, extremely bawdy plays they hosted would later be recognized as a distinct genre, the Restoration comedy. Women were allowed to perform onstage for the first time, social restrictions of all kinds were loosened, and there must’ve been a sense in the air that history was sweeping Britain along at immense speed toward the destiny of Empire.
As a dashing young man-about-town working for the Admiralty, Samuel Pepys was in the ideal position to witness history firsthand, and his diary is today considered a prime historical source on many notable events, particularly the Great Plague that killed 20% of London’s population in 1665-66 and the Great Fire that destroyed much of the city in 1666. But Pepys wrote about far more than the news of the day. He wrote about pretty much everything: gossip about the high-ranking people he crossed paths with, affairs of state, his own wenching and carousing, his health complaints, his marriage, the plays he saw, the coffeehouses and taverns he frequented, the whole tapestry of 17th century London. It’s fascinating, invaluable material if you’re at all interested in the period.
So, you may be wondering, if this diary is so endlessly fascinating, then why am I selling my copy of it? It all comes down to my number-one complaint: a lack of time. When I bought this set several years back, I had a lot of grandiose ideas. I had it in my head that I was a Literary Fellow not too different from Pepys himself, that I would someday own a vast library lined with built-in oak bookshelves that would be stuffed with thousands of volumes on all sorts of arcane subjects, which I would then read while sitting in a wine-colored wingback chair, wearing a favorite cardigan and smoking a pipe. You know, something like this. I imagined also that I would have time to take advantage of such a library. Well… you all can guess how that’s turned out. I haven’t smoked my pipe in years and my library is all in banker’s boxes that are kept in a cold, dark basement. I don’t own a wingback chair, and I don’t think I’m even all that literary anymore, to be honest. If I ever was. As interesting as I found that class on the Restoration, I’ve always preferred convenience-store pulp novels to the books my high-school teacher Mr. Bridge used to call “literature with a capital L.” And then there’s the matter of how much time I have at my disposal these days…
Basically, I’ve just realized that I’m not likely to ever read these books, so I’m hoping to get them into the hands of somebody who will. And who has the space to store books that I increasingly do not.
As I said, this is an 11-volume set of trade paperbacks that includes the complete text of Pepys’ diary, spanning the ten-year period 1660 to 1669, as well as a book-length index and a companion. They were published by the University of California Press in 2000, and are brand-new, still in their factory shrinkwrap, just as you see them in the picture above. I’d like to sell them as a complete set, and I’m asking $50 for the lot, a real bargain considering each volume lists for $28.95 on Amazon. If anyone reading this is interested, just shoot me a message at jason-at-jasonbennion.com (you know, of course, to replace “-at-” with “@”, right?). If you live in the Salt Lake area, we can arrange a face-to-face exchange; if you’re someplace else, let’s talk about shipping…
My friend Karen asked me recently for an update on the kitty boys, since I haven’t mentioned them in quite a while. They seem to be reasonably contented with their lives at the moment. Here’s a photo of two of them, Evinrude and Jack-Cat, cuddling with one another on my desk the other night:
Not the greatest shot from a technical standpoint, but I thought it would be enough to make folks go “awwwwwww!”
Now this is the protection system I need for my ‘stang!
It’s also, curiously enough, the only scene from Robocop 2 that I actually remember… go figure.
Seven PM, five nights ago, the big park-n-ride lot at the southern end of the light-rail line. I’ve just spent 35 minutes riding on the train; I have another 15 or 20 to go behind the wheel of my car before I see the lights of home. I’m tired. It’s been another of those relentless-onslaught kind of days that seem to have become the default for my job, and I really don’t need any more bullshit tonight.
I don’t know how far I parked from the train platform. I’ve never been good at judging distances. Not like my dad, who can tell at a glance and with surprisingly good accuracy how far away something is, anywhere from about a half-inch up to a half-mile. The walk from the platform to my car isn’t as far as a half-mile, but it’s a lot closer to that than it is to the half-inch, and it takes me a good minute or so to make the hike, the whole time thinking about how much I just want this day to be done.
My Mustang waits for me, gleaming dully in the orange glow of the sodium-vapor lamps. It’s a welcome sight. My keys are already in my hand, and I hit the unlock button on the remote-control fob from 20 paces away. The interior lights come on, the headlamps flash twice, and the car alarm chirps four times to indicate that it has been triggered at some point during the 10 hours since I armed it this morning. But of course it has. The alarm is always going off. If the park-n-ride’s closest neighbor wasn’t a sprawling hillside cemetery, I’m sure it would be a real nuisance. As it is, I doubt more than three breathing people ever hear the damn thing as it screams at the passing birds who set it off. I never wanted a car alarm, didn’t want to be one of those guys. It was my dad’s idea — no, actually his insistence — that I get one shortly after I bought the car, because he was just certain that a Mustang convertible was bound to attract trouble. I thought he was being silly, that nothing would happen to my car and that an alarm wouldn’t stop anything if it did. But I caved eventually, the way I always do with him. And I dutifully set it every single day, and some days I even feel a little safer.
I notice the problem through the driver’s-side window as I’m reaching for the door handle. The glove box is hanging open. And the lid to the center console between the seats is standing straight up. A cold prickle races over my arms and legs at the same moment a hot flush rolls through my stomach and face. Somebody has been in my car.
One of the morning radio teams in these parts has a weekly feature called “The List of Things That Must Go,” in which either they or listeners who write in (they alternate every other week) bitch about their pet peeves, i.e., things that must go. Today, someone went off on a lovely little rant about the recent trend toward referring to the Internet as “the cloud.” It’s not a cloud, this person insisted, it’s a physical thing composed of wires and servers and technology, and it already has a perfectly good name, the Internet, so why are people now calling it by this vague and pretentious buzzword?
Normally I’d be all kinds of down with this gripe, being as I am generally opposed to buzzwords and jargon in all their forms. But this morning I found myself listening with a bemused grin, thinking to myself that this person obviously doesn’t realize this term originated with the graphical depiction of the Internet as a cloud on networking diagrams. Because that was the simplest way to show a complex yet amorphous infrastructure that usually doesn’t need to be represented in any kind of detail on these types of diagrams. It’s not a marketing thing at all, or at least not entirely… it actually has some legitimacy!
God, I have got to get away from the tech industry somehow. I have no business knowing things like that.
Do you all remember The Dark Crystal, Jim Henson’s experimental fantasy film from the early ’80s? It’s really a masterpiece of pre-digital effects work and virtuoso puppetry that immerses the audience in an alien world populated entirely by non-human creatures. Anyhow, if you recall, there’s a scene in which the Skeses, the evil bird-like bad guys, use the power of the titular crystal to drain the life essence from the “Podlings,” the innocent little villagers who live nearby, rendering them into prematurely aged, brain-dead slaves. Here, refresh your memories… go ahead, I’ll wait…
So, yeah, my job has reminded me of a lot of this scene lately. Guess which character I am?
Hello? Anybody there?
Probably not, given the way I’ve been neglecting this place lately. Sorry about that, kids. If by some chance any Loyal Readers are still out there lurking in the dark after all this time, my sincerest apologies for disappearing on you. Blame the usual culprit: My day job has entered into another of those periodic cycles of soul-crushing, nonstop activity that seems to eat up my entire existence. I haven’t had to work any super-late nights recently, and for that I’m grateful. But even with that small boon, my days have been overstuffed and hectic, busy from the moment I hit the office until the moment I leave at night. I’ve been eating lunch at my desk and not taking breaks so I can get everything done in time to escape by six, but these extraordinary efforts don’t seem to make much of a dent; my in-box remains magically full no matter how quickly or selflessly I work, like some fiendish horn of plenty. Also, there’s been an iron slug of urgency hanging over every minute of every day because it’s all due yesterday, and if all that isn’t stressful enough, I’ve found myself fighting tooth-and-nail over such earth-shattering minutiae as whether or not it’s correct to put a period at the end of a sentence that ends in a URL. God, I hate it when it gets like this. A little busy stretch here and there is one thing, but when it’s sustained day after day for weeks on end…
I don’t think people who’ve never worked in advertising can fully grasp just how all-consuming — not to mention totally draining — this industry truly is. I certainly didn’t before I experienced it myself. It’s not that I dislike my job — no, really, I don’t, in spite of all the griping — so much as I hate not having the juice for anything but my job. Most nights, I don’t get home until after seven, so it’s not like I have much free time anyway, but when I do manage to carve out an hour for the things I want to do, well… I just don’t have much left to give them. I’ve tried to write, both fiction and blog content, but the words won’t come. I try to read, and I keep having to page back to remind myself of what’s going on. I put on a DVD and find myself dozing after five or ten minutes, so I have to rewind and try again, just like I do with the book. And it doesn’t help
that the sense of urgency I mentioned has started following me home, making me feel, no matter what I’m up to, that I don’t really have time to be wasting on this activity, that I ought to be doing something else that’s more important. Not that I know what that other thing is supposed to be, of course.
I feel like I’ve lost the connection to some of the deepest parts of my identity: whatever talents I have as a writer, my literary and cinematic interests, my curiosity, hell, my sense of enjoyment. Not being able to do the things I enjoy and by which I’ve always defined myself is generating tremendous anxiety for me. It’s immensely frustrating for me to be in this place. I feel like all I do anymore is work, commute, and sleep, and that kind of treadmill existence gets to me very quickly. Contrary to what a couple of my friends seem to believe, I’m no slacker… but no one will ever mistake me for a workaholic, either. Life isn’t supposed to be like this. Well, my life isn’t anyway.
Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I just don’t have what it takes to push through the mental haze and accomplish the things I think I want to do. But in talking to friends who do similar work, I really don’t think it’s just me. We all seem to have the same complaints, the same frustrations. The day job that was supposed to support us while we did our “real work,” whatever that may be — creative writing, art, music, some kind of craft, or just having a good life that’s about something other than the thing that earns us our living — has instead come to dominate and define our identities. Against all our wishes and best efforts, we’ve been assimilated. We’ve become drab little cogs in the infernal machine. And it’s destroying us, hollowing us out in tiny little spoonfuls of glittery dust that gets cast to the wind, never to come back.
Now, I know I’ve made all these complaints before. And I realize as well that many people — maybe even most people — have frustrating, time-consuming, unfulfilling jobs. I also know that I’m lucky to even have a job, the way things are these days. I feel guilty and self-centered for writing this, as if I have no right to complain. And I suppose from some perspectives, I don’t. But knowing other people have problems too is small consolation when you’re staring at the ceiling in the quiet hours after midnight, too wound up to sleep and too wrung out to do anything else, wondering when, exactly, your dreams started to die, and you’re horrified to realize you no longer remember exactly what those dreams even were, and worst of all, you feel like you’re failing the one test everyone wants to ace: life itself.
I never have handled failure well. I once had a complete meltdown because I got a B-minus in my eighth-grade science class. A B-minus put me in tears, can you believe that? I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I’ve been on the verge of tears a few times this week, too…
