Spectacles and Retrospectives

Yesterday, I had an angry day. A day filled with so much emotion and pain that I spent the day in a broken, onion-skin-fragile state. Today, I was in recovery –survival mode. I let myself sleep in. I ate cinnamon rolls for breakfast at lunchtime. I watched a Red Box movie and got lost in the sensory experience of folding towels fresh from the dryer. I didn’t get dressed until dinnertime and I didn’t leave my house until 7:00pm. Yesterday was such a strange experience. It was like having a fight with a lover while on vacation. Enraged simultaneously with passion and frustration, with love and contempt, with devotion and confusion. Fight all you want, you’re still going to be forced to sleep in the same bed and continue your journey when you awake. You can even make-up and move on. It’s still a relationship changer. As yesterday ended, I showered, brushed my teeth, took my medicine and crawled into bed with myself… and my misfiring immune system.   I have no enlight...

I am an avid reader of Consumer Reports. For three main reasons: 1.) I enjoy reading how human beings quantify and classify human-made products. Typically the products reviewed within the pages of this publication are items of luxury, the focus of the (perceived) American Dream. Televisions, stereos, Mp3 players, vacuums cleaners, refrigerators - these are the things that are dissected in Consumer Reports. These are the things that belong. 2.) I feel that as a person with monetary power (a power that only a minority of the world possesses) I have a responsibility to myself and to the larger global society to be informed when I make a purchase, especially a large one. 3.) My Aunt Jody read Consumer Reports religiously. As well as Reader's Digest (I read that, too. I have since I was about 9 years old). She was one of the most fascinating characters I have ever encountered. Reading what she read makes sense. Having qulified that this is a publication that I enjoy and...

I have a change machine.  The 1960's pink change machine sat in my grandparents garage for as long as I can remember. It was placed there after my grandfather sold his string of locally own coin-operated laundromats. I've always had an attraction to the change machine. As a child, I would ask what it was and why it was in the garage. It is a piece of machinery from a different time and place than myself. In my collection of personal memories, it has always taken at least a dollar to run a coin operated washing machine (that is when there were still coin operated machines. Most of the machines in my memory operated off of a debit card type system). I don't remember half-dollars ever being a comfortable form of common currency. And pink was never a cool color for anything (other than a baby girl's bedroom).  The change machine came into my possession a little over a year and a half ago. My grandmother was moving out of her house (which she had lived in for near...