Garbage-in -- Garbage-out

I was putting fresh butter in the butter dish recently and thought, while I was in the process of wondering why in hell Canadian butter suppliers don't package the stuff in little quarter-pound sticks like the Americans do, rather than in a big one-pound brick, that the round, blue-and-white container I was using must be over 50 years old. It formerly belonged to my mother and had a significant spot in the kitchen of my childhood. It is a mundane, inconsequential, but kind of nice connection with an earlier time.

'Connection' is the key word. The dish provides a sort of continuity in my life, even though it is an inanimate object. My parents are gone now, but I still use their butter dish, as well as the kitchen canisters, which are also the same classic blue and white.

This is my point. People leave us due to the realities of mortality. Those who are still around age and change, but things, if they are well cared-for, remain constants. I like that. I like that, not as a materialistic person, for I am not, but because I like to be connected at many levels.

This is why I was struck by a review I read in the Globe & Mail this weekend of a book entitled: Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. The subject of the tome is straightforward enough that it is almost a cliche. It is all about our throwaway society in which landfills are ascend skyward and outward, filled with the effluvia of our lives; the discards that have become shunned, not necessarily because they are no longer any good, but because they are no longer fashionable, or no longer current, or they have been (purposely) designed in such a way that the home handyperson can no longer make a repair, therefore the coffeemaker, toaster (when did you last buy a toaster that toasted bread properly, the way toasters of yore did?), vacuum cleaner, computer, television set, or VCR must go, and be replaced by something current.

The author, Giles Slade, cites the case of Japan in which young people discard cellphones that are a year old, primarily because they are no longer up-to-the-second and therefore if they are being used, it will cast aspersions on the fashionability of the user. It is a tale that I am sure could be repeated with other bits of gadgetry, and not just in Japan, either.

So, aside from the wastefulness and environmental despoilation that results from such an attitude, we have to accept that our economies are based on the fact that you must constantly renew. Obsolescence is built in to keep our friends and neighbors working and striving. Fair enough at one level. At the same time, some products, pricier ones especially, don't break down so rapidly. The idea is that if you pay twice as much for a car as you might pay for a Ford Focus, that car will last much longer. It probably will. Now Toyota or BMW or Audi is in a quandary. They want you to buy newer versions of their product. Therefore, they must render you dissatisfied with the old one. They must encourage you to feel distressed because that 15-year-old Beemer you're driving just isn't current.

There is something that is lost, however, in a society that dwells only on change-for-the-sake-of-change, and that is that aforementioned human connection with the objects of our lives. I have a lovely little car. It's a sports-car; it's fun to drive; it has lots of power; it's a convertible (and driving a convertible on a sunny day is almost better than sex); and I love it to bits. It is also 14-years-old. I should be dissatisfied. I should want a new one. But, I don't. I love that car. I am emotionally attached to it. If the day ever comes that it gives up the mechanical ghost, I'll probably cry. If I were to win the lottery tomorrow, I would probably buy a new car, an exotic something or other, but you know, I would still keep the old one. I owe it.

I have a 10-year-old TV. It works wonderfully well. I like the big new flat-screen sets, but I have no drive to get one. At the end of the day it would still be a TV, and most of the programming would still be shit.

I finally broke down and bought a new computer a few months ago. I had to. The old one was just so archaic that it could not do anything that I needed it to do. So, I use my nice little laptop and I am very happy with it. But, my old one is still sitting on the far side of the home office, and I don't want to get rid of it. It can still carry out some functions. Again, since I bought it in 1994, I feel I owe it. It served me well.

In my closets I have shirts, jackets, slacks, and sweaters that are, in some cases, decades old. They were expensive items. They look great. I have a shirt I bought in 1975 that I still get compliments on, with people wondering where I bought it. Why do I need to buy new stuff? Because the economy demands it? I say, screw the economy from a personal perspective. No, I haven't turned commie, but I have no desire to be a profligate consumer and discarder to fill the coffers of some magnates somewhere, and contribute to an environmental concern that is, for me, a much bigger problem than so-called global warming. Of course, holus-bolus manufacturing is also an aspect of global warming.

Anyway, I like my stuff. I'm attached to it. And I will only replace it if it is truly no longer of value. Or, sometimes, on a whim, if I have the money and just fancy a new item of some sort because it offers something that is better than what I had. . I bought a DVD player a couple of years ago. I like it. My car has cruise-control. I would never be without it in any car I might own in future.

Right now my car is in the shop. Just a minor problem. But I wonder if it is missing me. I am missing it.