Saturday, January 19, 2013

Dust In The Wind

I treated myself to a new dustpan today. Don’t judge me for my choice of verb.

I sweep a lot (and yet still not enough.) My dog sheds like a mofo, presuming that mofos look like Cousin Itt and shed hair worse than a Porsche driver in denial.

The rubber end-thingie on my current dustpan is peeling off. Ergo, I legitimately need a new one. Q.E.D., and all that.

But yeah, “treat”, while honest and true, is kind of pathetic when applied to a dustpan.

Or is it?

Look, there are things you use almost every day, day in, day out, day after day etc. Objects so intrinsic to your life that however mundane they may be, they are now a part of that life. You don’t think about them, you just use them.

When was the last time you bought new scissors? Or replaced the chair at your desk? I don’t care how rarely you cook, you probably have a favorite knife or spoon. Besides, if you don’t cook that often, you definitely have a favorite bowl to eat out of. Out of which to eat.

Oh, never mind.

You have stuff you like to use even though you never thought of it that way.

All this brings me back to my old dustpan. It doesn’t qualify.

I don’t love to sweep, and I won’t experience a montage of nostalgic sweep-y memories when I finally toss the damned thing.

But I stand by my verb because my new dustpan is nice and it’s shiny, so why not?

2 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Morgue said...

Now I'm seeing sweep nostalgia montages featuring an artfully lit, slo-mo dustpan, followed by some kind of faux-calligraphic epitaph. Now it's a montage of lots of household items in slo-mo, but in quick clips so we can get through all the ones that died this year, like the Academy Awards "In Memoriam" reel. Now I'm eating some chips, and done describing what I'm thinking about in realtime.