Jareth has picked up another Mommy-ism. One of Amy's expressions.
I was putting some dishes in the dishwasher while he was sitting in his chair after breakfast. He sees a big serving spoon:
"That's a big honkin' spoon."
This was an interesting week. We had an old camper at the store. It wasn't worth much, but it did still work (for what it was). It was the same type as we had when I was a kid.
There was a 14 year old boy in with his Grandpa on Wednesday. The kid saw it and loved it. Had to have it. So Grandpa bought it for him, and the kid will be mowing Grandpa's lawn to pay it back. Just the right kind of story. That felt cool.
Thursday, late in the day, a couple of guys come in. They're dressed in clothes so ragged they barely stay on. They've got about one mouth full of brown and crooked teeth between the two of them. I figure most sales people would've blown them off pretty quick. They ask about used trailers.
I end up selling them two that we had taken in on trade. They haven't been inspected yet, nothing fixed, totally as-is. They're more than fine with that. Turns out they make pretty good money fixing carnival rides. They need the trailers to live in, and a couple thousand cash for a trailer is nothing. They can fix anything that's wrong, as long as the A/C works.
Today on the way home, listening to a comedy public radio show, there's a mock commercial for duct tape:
...Because often enough the quick fix is all you need to keep something going until you can learn to live without it. This segment brought to you by duct tape--just about the only thing that really works sometimes.
I saw this quote on a Cauldron post:
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” --Gustav Mahler
We rented some movies over the weekend so that we'd have something at the end of each day after making progress in Kayla's room. It's yellow now. Pictures coming when it's done. If nothing else, Amy's certain to post some. :-)
One of the movies was King Kong. Delightful film. At the same time adventure story, monster story, period piece, and social commentary. Even romance included. Now, I'm not sure I ever saw the original. Sure, I watched the King Kong cartoon in the mornings as a 70's kid, but that hardly counts.
Kong captured something in the film that I rarely see captured in a film. The other one that did it was Instinct.
Both movies deal in part with capturing wildness and breaking it. Both show what happens when you take something so purely free and cage/chain it. We are all still wild, at least some tiny part of us.
In Instinct, Cuba Gooding Jr's psychologist character takes Anthony Hopkins' anthropologist character Ethan Powell to a zoo to see live gorillas. The gorillas are sitting about lazily. Powell explains that it's been so long in a cage for the gorilla that he has forgotten that he was ever free. Now he just thinks freedom is something he dreamed once.
We are all caged by society. By its norms and expectations and taboos, by the money that drives it. We like to think we are free because we can gather to debate things, and print books and articles, and vote and have free speech. But our very days begin with an alarm clock telling us to get up.
Animals sleep and wake following day/night cycles. When they're tired they go to sleep or rest. When we're tired we still stay up because there's so much we "have" to do. We get up before we're ready because we "have" to.
Our society is built on rules. Some are enforced legally, some socially. Women can't leave the house without makeup. Just running to a store becomes a process. We drive to work, and how many laws affect just our commute. Not that those aren't necessary laws, but still.
We get in the car (that we have to have license plates on to drive, and village stickers to park). We buckle the seatbelts because that's a "primary enforcement activity" where we drive. We have speed limits, although that's one we seem to break freely, pretending to run free while we stay in our lane and supposedly use turn signals. We get to work and park between the lines.
Even the forest preserves have fences and marked boundaries. Everything in its spot, in its place. Our society puts things in neat boxes, and there are lines we can't see that mark where our yard ends and the neighbor's begins. There are even laws about mowing your lawn. I know because twice now I've gotten "citations" for letting my grass get long enough to seed. So instead of letting my grass get thicker naturally, by sprouting seeds to drop and grow, I cut it down before it gets that far just to go buy seeds that have been grown for me.
I can't even look out the window without seeing power lines. Every day I drive past forest preserves on the way to work. How I long to be able to just stop and run wild and free, even if just for a while. But is there any escape from our human zoo?