A Solid State Manifesto
The reason that I ended up drinking margaritas at 4 PM on a Tuesday afternoon with my father was that his blender had tried to electrocute him.
When I say that his blender had tried to electrocute him, I’m quite aware that it makes his former kitchen appliance sound much more malicious than it actually was. In reality, it’s just another testimony as to how things are no longer made to last.
I had a blender though- two blenders actually. One is a much newer model and I suppose someday will try to electrocute me in a vain attempt for attention. The other one is a Solid State blender from the 1960’s that belonged to my Grandmother. It weighs approximately seventy pounds and was designed to be a back up bludgeon for housewives to use against domestic attackers.
Simply put, this sucker was built to last.
When the aliens are scavaging through the wreckage of our inevitable nuclear war, they’re going to find my blender right along side the cock roaches.
I don’t intend to speak solely of my blender though. Rather, I’d like to use this blender as a device to illustrate the values of yesteryear versus the values of today.
Things really did used to be built to last. I’m sure you’ve heard your grandparents, if not parents, say that before and they are correct. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and the instruction booklet to my forty+ year old blender doesn’t even make any mentions of warranties.
I was born in 1981 and I have owned more disposable items that I would care to admit. Welcome to the age of disposability. I have very little money but I live like a king compared to a hundred years ago. I live like a king compared to my Grandparents who lived through the Great Depression. I wish I was able to say ‘remember when…’ from grandparents or parents points of view, but the honest truth is that I came of age during a time that is based around the things we own and I’m just as guilty as everyone else for helping perpetuate that.
My father and I sat on the floor of his kitchen and talked about jobs. I have no degrees. I don’t desire wealth. I’ve spent the last few years of my life living in 10×10 rooms surrounded by everything that I own and I still feel like I have too many things.
My father thinks that I need to find a job that is stable and won’t change with demands in labor. I suppose that’s reasonable advice coming from who a man who is newly retired, 29 years married, the father of two children, and a model of stability in every sense of the word. It’s almost like he’s an artifact from a time I don’t really understand.
How do you find stability in truly disposable times? Stability is difficult to resell. Stability is difficult to upgrade. Stability seems like an idea that belongs in farms houses without electricity 100 years ago.
I’m coming to understand that I feel very out of place in the time that I live in. I read books and daydream and wonder what it was like when there weren’t cars anywhere and wonder what the cities looked like as well. It wasn’t all that long ago, really.
I’m not interested in my credit rating or credit cards. I want to be without the car I own and the costs that go with it. I don’t want a mortgage. I don’t want to slave. I feel very lost trying to find the ‘fine line’ and the idea occurs to me that there isn’t one.
Oh, I’m a dreamer to the core. I have mountain man fantasies daily, imagining myself living alone in some forest in a cabin like Grizzly Adams or an extra from Gentle Ben. I imagine myself fishing in streams, hiking backwoods trails, and smoking a wooden piper in a rocker on my porch at night. The only people I see are the ones that are near and dear. The dream is comfortable. The dream is appealing.
The reality is that I work daily providing assistance to people for a service that while they may regard as livelihood, serves more the purpose of entertainment. The reality is that I typed this up on a computer word processor.
Oh, how I get carried away with myself.
We drank our margaritas for awhile and the tequila kicked in. Tequila is nice as it not only loosens lips but it relaxes a man on a hot summer day. When it’s just my father and I together, I’m allowed to speak very freely; man to man as it were. The introduction of alcohol to our relationship has liberated our conversations more. The talk shifted more and more to the disposability of our culture, our current state of affairs, the war in Iraq, and my inherited Solid State blender.
It was funny the way my father shifted from giving me employment advice to railing against the way money controls our society- but I’m sure that a combination of alcohol and a shared ideals can be blamed for that.
I inherited an interest in history from my father and anytime we have any sort of long conversation it does become a conversation point. Especially the inherent repetitions in history. We laugh about the French and Communist revolutions and wish that we could be the ones lining up Karl Rove, Donald Rumsefeld, Dick Cheney, the Big Cheese, etc. at the wall or the guillotine. We’ll watch documentaries on World War II, ancient Egypt, cavemen, and the American frontier for hours on end. I remember the first time he ever told me about the Democratic Convention of 1968. We were driving somewhere, time has erased that part of the memory, and he seemed just as angry about what Daley’s pigs did to the young people in the streets 30 years after it happened.
What I’m getting at is that, to my father and I, history is very, very real. We both like to point out how short our American history actually is. We both like to point out how short a time we’ve actually been able to live the way we do in this country.
In the time my Solid State blender has existed and kept on working there have been nine American Presidents. There was the Bay of Pigs Invasion. There was the Vietnam War, the Watergate Scandal, the Energy Crisis, the Iran Contra Affair, Grenada got invaded, the Soviet Union collapsed, there were two wars in Iraq, and that’s such an abridged list that adding things like Disco, Punk Rock, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Terrorism, and September 11, 2001 still doesn’t do it justice. It does, however, make it sound like an updated version of Billy Joel’s song We Didn’t Start the Fire.
Consider the Twentieth century for a moment. The Twentieth century came in on a cart that was drawn by an Ox and went out by airplane with tickets that it purchased on the internet. A thousand years ago we were still fighting wars with swords and spears and other ‘primative’ weapons that lasted as long as the entire Twentieth century did.
And that was fairly normal for thousands of years prior to that.
Also note that the Twentieth century is the only century thus fa where the United States was a super power, and that was only after World War I.
Lest you feel that I’m ranting, just remember these things the next time someone talks about ‘the way things have always been’. The only consistent things in history are changes, water, and shit.
Knowing that change is consistent makes me wonder where we’re headed as a culture. How much longer can we keep producing things we don’t actually need? How much longer can we sustain a demand for things we don’t actually need? When does history finally rise to the surface to bite us on the ass?
I have no answers for that. I do have a 40+ year old blender though and if you have the lime concentrate and triple sec, I’ll get the tequila.