Spending the better part of the day yesterday padding dinnerware for a move I got to thinking about that lady’s decades built collection of service trays, crystal goblets, and hand painted china and took a few things from it. (from the thinking not the house stupid, I am no thief)
1. I am really glad that everything I own of value is rugged enough and of small enough volume to ship on a single pallet, albeit a very heavy one as my most important tools alone weigh about a half ton combined.
2. As fussy and useless as I found most of this woman’s stuff it got harder to differentiate from the piles of shiny metal that stir something inside me right behind the optic nerve that can’t be quieted about its demand that you possess that thing.
At some point in the development of the human mind through all it’s evolutionary growth this urge that is too strongly felt to be denied as instinctive must have been very important to our specie’s development and survival, discernment and recognition of qualities and desire for them in a toolmaking species would be necessary to find the things among the wilderness that would be most useful to your endeavor to catch game and forage efficiently to feed your growing & more upright/less hairy with each generation clan like differentiating ore in stone from dung or recognizing good sustenance from disease and rot.
This woman couldn’t fight it (the sparkle response) and bought every time a crystal refracted a rainbow from sun light and I have to settle for staring at a highly polished track hub set through the bike shop glass until I can afford one.
I try to differentiate my weakness in the knees for expensive components and perfectly joined materials from hers for limited edition plate sets on the grounds that the things I am responding to when I look at a bike part are tied directly to it’s quality and therefore performance in its required task, but honestly a dull one would most likely work just as well and I would want to have it even if I didn’t intend to use it.
The other difference is that I am not a careful collector so much as an abuser of the objects I desire, that’s why rather than on display most of my beautiful objects lie battered in the bicycle catacomb, I guess my unwillingness to keep up with the polish on my pretty things is why I transferred the urge to wanting to build them.
A whole other can of worms is the sparkle response in interpersonal relations. Kind of a sobering cause for reflection if the bike catacomb is allegory to my current heartbreak.
