The Disastrous Limits of Things

Look, I defer to no one in my love of things. I don’t need an excuse to buy things. I will use any opportunity, including indigence, to acquire things, which are not to be confused with George Carlin’s stuff, which seems to have required ample amounts of room, whereas my things are the very space I inhabit, their very thingness a place to hang my hat. If I wore a hat. Which is just one more thing I need to get.

Things are what made America great, and no one makes better things than America. (In fact, when the first map of the New World was being drafted by Mattias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemuller, one of the names being considered for what came to be known as North America was Reiland, which in Latin means Land of Things. I just made that up off the top of my head. Neat, no?)

But what I will not do is to make of the horrific events in Japan an opportunity to buy things. That is where I draw the line. And I don’t draw a lot of lines, because a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and I’m in no hurry to get anywhere.

Certainly this Slate checklist of things you need to run out and buy to protect yourself in the event of a Richter-smashing earthquake or equally annihilatory disaster is, for the most part, pretty pedestrian: food and water. Got it. Flashlight. OK. Batteries. Check. Multiple emergency kits. Where the hell do they think I live, Krakatoa east of Java?

Now I put a lot of faith in the power of my things to protect me from all manner of distress. How often have I been rescued from the depths of serious depression merely by contemplating the magnificence of my things? Twice. But I draw yet another line (one more and I will have one of those drat triangles, which I was forced to play in kindergarten despite protests from the city council) at their ability to ward off the threats of a petulant and eructating Nature. Were the totality of my things to be assigned a numerical density, I doubt it would prove sufficiently high to shield me from all the after-effects, calculable and incalculable, of earthquake, monsoon, typhoon, ordinary everyday oon, cyclone, tornado, hurricane, laggardcane, lidocaine, and, of course, CBS’s Monday night comedy lineup.

Nevertheless, once things have calmed in the Far East, I will undoubtedly return to my old ways, breaking the back of my already devastated credit card, dipping deep into my cash reserves, cashing out my retirement accounts, borrowing against collateral that itself has been pawned so as to buy back my pawns (without which playing chess is a ludicrous affair), and ripping apart my great-grandmother’s Edwardian settee for the odd lost nickel (and nothing is odder than losing a nickel in a settee) — all so as to secure the wherewithal to buy more things.

Friends will fail you, government will fail you, your health will fail you, your high school math teacher will fail you, but things abide. Which explains the smell.