There was a very sweet moment in the recent episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Sweetness and Sunny seldom align, so it was noteworthy. Resident whipping boy Charlie ends up spending a night on the beach with The Waitress. The Waitress had taken a bunch of Ecstasy before she encountered Charlie and therefore has no recollection of what transpired, so Charlie attempts to jog her memory by showing her first the dead sand crab that they dug up while they were exploring the wonders of marine life. The Waitress doesn't remember anything, and instead heaves the dead animal away, as any sensible person would. So Charlie breaks out the cool jade-like object that The Waitress gave to him during her drug-induced euphoria. She correctly identifies Charlie's precious jewel as the bottom of a broken beer bottle and storms off in a huff.
My question here - is it weird that I relate to Charlie's attachment to what could only very generously be described as emotional junk?
Impulsive collecting of trinkets and the assignation of emotional content to them is not usually considered healthy behavior. Serial killers like to keep hair or bits of clothing from their victims, after all. Still, a certain level of sentimentality isn't harmful. And so I wore the pair of jeans that Kim bought me until I literally couldn't walk in them because the knee was so badly blown out that half my shin would protrude through the hole. At my next job, I exclusively used the silver mini-tray that all my friends at Dos Caminos had inscribed with their wine keys on my last night there, until I left it in a cab a year later. I kept a single brown argyle sock that I wore mismatched because it was the survivor of a pair that Tara gave me for my birthday. For years I wore a bandanna that I found at the bottom of a lake. That, too, was left in a cab. In a box next to the envelope with my undergraduate diploma that I never opened is a child's watch with Pinkie and the Brain on the face and a busted band that hasn't ticked in a decade. Sometimes I think of getting a safe deposit box just for that.
Why do we bestow such memorial power on stupid shit? Every item that I've wanted to retain and eventually lost or misplaced or replaced or finally thrown out didn't take the emotions or the memories that I associated with it. The impermanent world that our brain struggles to comprehend as it flashes past us doesn't suddenly become fixed within some shiny bauble or faded stitch of cloth.
Charlie is actually kind of a great role model for someone who wants to be rid of the power that totems can hold. He lives in a perpetual present that makes complete sense to him and is defined by simple parameters: Gang=good; Waitress=love; Food=necessary. Of course, serial killers also live in perpetual presents that make complete sense to them and are defined by simple parameters.
Looks like a future of hoarding for me!
No comments:
Post a Comment