Today’s post in which unfortunately my bathroom read, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, creeps into my writing style, doing for the fine art of junk shopping what Roland did to the World Wide Wrestling Federation:

What a difference a day makes, 24 little hours. It is Dina Washington’s Birthday today: Queen of the Blues and the Juke. She had a short life, dead at 39 from an accidental overdose of diet pills. The biographers have weighed in and all sides concur, it was a sad but not a desperate mistake. She would have been eighty. This little morsel came from my NPR breakfast, delivered on the platter of my new Jensen AM/FM stereo armband radio that I purchased yesterday while rummage sale surfing with Angela.

This gismo holds the promise of exercise, a habit I have yet to master. I also nearly bought a Trek mountain bike, a clock, a standing ashtray, a set of plates, a light for a fish tank sans tank, a bread machine, two tiki mugs, a penguin style ice bucket, and a few other odds and ends, but I am cash poor at the moment so ah well. I did buy the radio, a thermos for my coffee, and a universal remote for the VCR. Angela bought two puzzles for the girls at her work who do puzzles on their breaks. I am going back to one of the junk shops for the clock, which I shant describe as I will be gifting it, but the other maybes are still simmering.

It feels good to junk shop in the homogenized world of pop-and-fresh houses and cookie cutter people, bouncing around the easy-bake nightmare of Sims suburbia where it often seems that living has in fact been reduced to the level of a game. There is more personality in junk; that may have originally been aimed at, but clearly has missed mass appeal. As you hunt and gather you wander the philosophic shoals of identity, wetting your ankles on the irrefutable truth of who you are reflected in the mirror of what you like. The sea is of course the nature nurture battleground of aesthetics, a sometimes province of truth(s). Junk shopping uncomplicates the debate through the powerful unseen hand of the pure market, “I like that enough to buy it.” “I am someone who likes this.”

By the same measure, you might also consider what you are willing to part with, what you are done with or no longer need, and gain on identity that way. One of the rummage sales we went to had the combined detris of a neighborhood poured out onto a single lawn to raise money for a sick child, whom everyone in that neighborhood seemed to know. We didn’t find any junk to buy there, but we bought two hot dogs to contribute to the cause. I’m sure if you’re listening for them you’ll hear in my thinking the echoes of Plato and Kant as regards the fallen forms and reflections of what is true. All the objects on that lawn were perhaps useful to someone, even abstractly useful to us in that self definition functions through exclusion much more than inclusion so identity becomes an I-am-not more than an I-am, but none of those items are as necessary to anyone as the health and recovery of that child.

From that perspective it’s of course dangerous to equate identity with consumption lest we value the thing more than the person or treat the person like a thing. Or, as was pointed out by E.M. Forester in the novel Howard’s End, we say want, want, want and thereby obscure the “I” that wants, denying both the responsibility to know yourself and the complicity of any materialist in the cost of their privilege. There are good Buddhist objections here too, such as the assertion that desire is the root of all evil. Though I suppose for Buddhists desire is primarily a problem because it reinforces, rather than obscures, the illusion that there was an “I” to begin with, all other consequent suffering caused by desire stems from the false assumption that there is a sustainable ego that might benefit from selfish behavior. Then you get into chicken and egg applied philosophy, do we lose our ego to live better or do we live better to lose our ego.

In junk shopping we at least avoid Forester’s problem by humbly acknowledging at the outset that everything we are looking through is always and already someone else’s trash. As for the Buddhist concerns, most junk shops sell white ceramic Buddhas of some form or another, it’s up to you if you want kill the Buddha, buy the Buddha, or drop ashes on it when you meet it on the road. Ultimately, I think Junk shopping is a humble pursuit. The needle in haystack, the diamond in the rough is what we’re after on the shelves and in ourselves.

In other rough diamond news, yesterday we celebrated Hannah’s 30th birthday. “It seems like you’re always having a party,” Donna Jean Antoinette (my mother) with more than a little concern in her voice. It’s true that we are always having a party.

“For while we must go forever in despair, let us also go forever in the enjoyment of the world.” The God Pan to the wandering Alobar in the Tom Robbins Novel Jitterbug Perfume, a novel which is not as good as I want it to be, but is better than nothing at all and seems germane to today’s line of thinking.

Reading it, and writing this, is what I am doing today. I am finding Tom Sophomoric and must admit that I liked him best when I was in High School, when his challenges seemed daring. Currently I like his gift for description and surprising metaphor and I must assume he’s gotten much better than the writing in this book. I own some of his more recent work but haven’t cracked it. I suppose this book will be a way in.

I feel on this fine Sunday like a king at his leisure. I have feasted and all is well. Left over brats and BBQ chicken have constituted both my breakfast and my two-am post bar cravings. We went on what I used to call the long haul last night and just as I have outgrown the writings of a young Tom Robbins, so too have I outgrown the long haul. I expressed it to Hannah this way, “I like this bar well enough and I am having a good time, but you have to remember that while you were getting married and raising a kid I was doing this. So it doesn’t have the same newness or appeal to me.” That said I did have a good time, and more importantly Hannah seemed to have a great time. Details to follow………….