new shelves arrived yesterday, surprisingly on-time, and i spent the night and most of today re-arranging my bottomless stacks of old magazines. i feel like this pointless manifestation of OCD will have some payoff some day, i just don’t know when. at the moment a friend and i are dicking around trying to code an Android App using the site content. it’s fun but kind of tiring at times. my eyes are bad, and i can’t code for very long at a stretch any more. or maybe i just have no patience.

i filled a pickle jar with coins and dollar bills, and now have moved on to filling a piggy bank from my childhood, a metal pig with a metal coil of a tail, and a long-lost tiny screw that used to hold the piggy bank shut. it is the size and type of screw that might mysteriously show up in a drawer or on a shelf, its former purpose lost to the wands of time.

i have another bank, a phone box bank, sent to me by friends who were visiting the UK some years ago. they sent me a piggy bank in the shape of a british public phone box, the iconical red columnnar enclosure that is probably the most recognized and iconic phone box in the world..

my phone box is stuffed with coins, though for its size i doubt if it holds even $10. i famously (famous to me, that is) bought a $1000 mission-style recliner chair with money i had thrown into a bucket over a couple of years. change has a way of accumulating in my life, but i’ve become much better-disciplined about unloading it. it really gets to be a glutton for space, and too heavy to move around, or to take to the bank. and when you do take large amounts of coin to the bank there is always the chance that, on account of the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, the bankers might presume this to be some kind of money-laundering transaction or terroristic funding initiative. so on that basis i basically hoarded my change for years, senselessly stuffing the space under my bed and in kitchen cabinets with money that was not only of relatively insignificant amount which, in its minuteness, did nothing, not even collecting 5-cents a year in interest.

most of that coinage is gone from my living space, but the pickle jar and the piggy bank are symptomatic of my penchant for accumulation.

and when is a piggy bank not a piggy bank? when there is no pig? no piggy? the phone box bank is not properly called a phone box bank, for who would know (without explanation) what that means? piggypiggypiggy.

have you seen the little piggies? leading piggy lives?

the first american popular music song i remember hearing on the radio was “Baby You’re a Rich Man”, and what i remember in particular were the lines “How does it feel to be/One of the beautiful people?” i was a child in Laos when i heard that song. most of the radio programming in Laos was from Thailand and the announcers and spoken content were mostly in Thai, but the songs were usually American records sung in English. i remember that confusing jumble of talk in another language, gibberish-to-me juxtaposed against English-language songs from the Beatles and Peter and Gordon.

as a child i felt that the question “How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?” was directed at me, straight at me, like the song existed only for me, was written for and sung explicitly to me. it made me think i was a beautiful person, and over time as i matured (hah) i maintained that belief in a progressively cynical way. oh, i was beautiful all right. the ugly american is beautiful in his own mirror. the question itself, i eventually realized, was patronizing and bitter. i don’t know the details of the song but i imagine it was mostly john lennon’s craft. i thought of that song when someone explained to me, decades later, that the song about “you like to think your shit don’t stink” was really saying that your shit smells awful. duh. the guy explaining this prescient insight to me was a self-absorbed drunk, but a very articulate self-absorbed drunk, and on account of his mannerisms i sat and nodded my head, agreeing, feigning wonderment at his wisdom, mumbling “Very true, Plato,” under my allegedly superior mental breath.

what?

the shelving of magazines, and the requisite re-shelving of other books and things was, and is, a lot of work, but it will be good to have the stacks of old magazines orderly and off of the floor. i should throw away a lot more copies than i do, or donate them to the thrift shop up the street. many copies are decrepit and moldering, some of them obviously originated from a “smoking home” and therefore smell like asshole. others are just torn and fallen to bits, but i never discard a magazine unless it is all of the above and i have a solid, quality copy to replace it. at the moment i have a stack of bedraggled copies labeled “SAC”, meaning “Sacrifice.” i will scan and discard those copies since they are in miserable condition and I have at least one copy to back up each of them (usually i have 2 or more copies).

ok, then, let us close that window which looked down onto my ridiculous existence.