Why do I care about owning things?
I went through a phase where it seemed very important to gather towards me the things that I had loved at a kid. There was, for instance, a book of Robert Bloch short stories, a couple of which I remembered vividly, that I had, I think, when I was around 10 years old. The book, in the edition I owned, had a singular and memorable cover:
That's not even the first printing; there's a more common, probably more valuable edition of the book, maybe more than one if it came out in hardcover, but that cover was the one on the book that I had as a kid, and was a big part of the appeal -- because I used to have horrible nightmares involving the Grim Reaper. They were very realistic, set in the actual condo where I lived with my parents -- maybe when I was aged six or seven, not much older. The mood of the dream would be happy at first: I would be playing outside with my friends, then would go to open the door to go inside, and AAAUUUGH: the Grim Reaper was waiting just inside the door! The whole mood of the dream shifted from playful to terrifying and I would wake up in a panic, heart pounding. At that point I didn't even know who the Grim Reaper was, didn't understand he was the Angel of Death -- it was just some sort of supernatural figure, in dark robes, with a skull for a face, who I'd been terrified by in images in the back of Famous Monsters of Filmland.
The dream recurred a few times, with a couple of variants, and so I grew to mistrust the landscape of my dreams. If I was walking towards a door in my dream, I would stop before opening it, knowing that this skull-faced entity could be waiting inside. I knew that my dreams might be trying to trick me. One time I even dreamed I was upstairs, and that my mother was calling me to come downstairs, and I decided that it was actually this nightmare figure PRETENDING to be my mother, waiting just downstairs, trying to lure me. I wouldn't come downstairs, in that dream; instead, I fought it, tried to wake myself up, slapping myself in the face. You aren't going to get ME!
My dreams grew increasingly lucid and interactive, so that, if I thought ol' skullface was going to suddenly appear, was waiting around the corner in a dream that was poised to turn bad, I'd ram myself into the walls of the room I was in, hit myself, etc. Not sure if I actually was hitting myself in real life, lying there in bed, but there was little I had experienced that terrified me more than those nightmares. It seemed imperative I get out of them however I could.
Which brings us back to this paperback. I loved Bloch -- he wrote gruesome little short stories, which I enjoyed much more than his novels. I read a few of those too: Firebug, The Scarf, and Psycho II, the story for which had utterly no relationship to that of the Psycho II film: it's about a police detective so obsessed with catching Norman Bates that he doesn't realize that Bates is dead and that, in his obsessive need to catch him, his own personality has fragmented -- that the killer he's pursuing is actually himself. It sounds like a fun premise, but I don't remember being very impressed with the book at the time. Bloch's stories, however -- I had several anthologies -- were really fun, almost shaggy dog stories, each one ending on gross-out punchlines that are just the sort of thing to delight a horror-minded kid. There was one I even adapted into a sort of play for drama class, as a young teenager, where an honest cop, a good man, is killed by a corrupt colleague, chopped up, and served as meat to the guests at a barbeque, as a novel way of getting rid of the body. His partner confronts the killer at said barbeque, not realizing that he's actually helping dispose of the evidence in the form of the steak on his plate. When he figures it out, there's a punchline where Bloch reminds us that this cop had been a good man, and "you can't keep a good man down."
That's your typical Bloch move, there: ending on a one-liner that is equal parts corny groaner and gruesome nightmare. He's the guy who said, famously, that despite his reputation, he actually had the heart of a small child... which he kept in a jar on his desk.
Anyhow.
The paperback with that cover actually terrified me, when I saw it on the shelf at a used bookstore of my childhood (Haney Books, RIP). It might have been the reason why I needed to own it, the thing that drew me in BECAUSE it repelled me; it may even have been the first Bloch I picked up, drawn by that cover alone. It's the same logic by which I figure that my utter terror at the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, mentioned in my previous post, were essential in getting me into horror cinema -- the desire to control, understand, and come to terms with that which terrified me, affected me, made me vulnerable. Bloch is for writing what Oz was for cinema, for me, for getting me into reading actual prose, not just Warren Magazines and House of Mystery comics and such. His stories were memorable and delightful to my young mind, if sometimes very dark, and a few of them remained wedged in my brain, like the last sentence of the story "The Hungry Eye," from the very collection under discussion: the tale describes someone possessed by a dark force, killing someone, which he describes in terms of "feeding;" it's not as corny as the usual Bloch punchline, but it really got under the skin (it's something like, "I picked up the knife, walked towards her, and fed the Hungry Eye"). Some of the other stories were more SF than horror, even bordering on Swiftian social satire -- like "Sales of a Deathman," which I still think could be adapted into a memorable movie, a blackly comic trifle about an advertising executive who, to help solve the world's overpopulation problem, creates an advertising campaign for suicide that is so successful that everyone in the world dies, except for a few old executives from the same company, a beautiful young (female) secretary, and the adman himself, whom everyone is counting on to help repopulate the world (the punchline is something like, "I haven't got the heart to tell them I'm sterile").
I spent quite a bit of time and effort trying to re-acquire that paperback a few years ago. And like I say, it wasn't just about reading the stories again, or owning the book, it was about owning the book in the edition that I had had as a kid. I went through the same thing with Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside: why would I want a book with this cover:
When I could have the one that appealed to me as a kid, that had made me want to read the book in the first place:
...that also being a book I took pains a few years ago to re-acquire in the same edition that mattered to me when I first owned it. I still have it. That one, I actually can justify re-owning, because I think I'd like to read it again; beside its including the first description of an LSD trip I ever encountered, it has a resonant theme -- a man who grew up psychic, trying to come to terms with the waning of his gifts as he ages -- which I think would be more meaningful to me as an adult than as a teenager.
The Bloch, on the other hand, when I finally got it... I realized I had no desire to re-read it at all. It sat on my shelf for a few months, un-opened, before I figured this out. Like Aurora monster models, the stories of Harlan Ellison, the art of Richard Corben, and vintage episodes of Star Trek and The Night Stalker, it was something I had lasting fondness for from my childhood that really didn't translate into the world of my adult interests. Just like I had wanted to own it as a child so I could control the thing that frightened me, I had wanted to re-own it as an adult because it had meant something to me as a child. The difference was, back then, owning it actually included a desire to read it, the ability to take pleasure from Bloch's (ultimately kind of immature and silly) short stories. Why would I want to re-read them, though?
When I realized that in fact, owning it was all I had wanted, that the book was just sitting there, unread, and would continue to do so... I brought it back to the used bookstore where I'd acquired it, Carson Books.
At least the brief owning-it-again-and-discovering-I-did-not-care served to satiate the need, scratch the itch. It also helped me realize that there is a ton of stuff I have gathered towards me specifically because I want to own it, not use it.
It's not always easy to know what's driving the desire, though. Is it JUST about ownership, or is there active interest in the use of the thing? I still think about re-acquiring a comic book that fascinated me as a teenager:
...but why? Why do I need this? Do I actually want to read the stories in it? No; it's just an artifact, the contents of which I barely remember, something that, if I acquired it again, I would PROBABLY just put in a box with the other comic books that I remember from my youth (there are a couple of Slow Deaths in there, but not this one). Again, it might mean something more to me now than it did then, given my own dance with cancer in recent years, and it might interest me if, in re-reading it, it sparked a memory of a formative attitude or such, given that it was probably the first time in my life I really thought about cancer; still, I have paused in the re-acquiring it, because I no longer trust the impulse.
I'm writing this for a specific reason, related to my New Year's Resolution, y'see. It's still January, and I'm already struggling. I had decided, on one of my trips to Main Street, that I wanted to flip a couple of records -- because I could surely still trade records for new ones, even if I was vowing not to buy any new ones this year. The problem is that in the process of flipping a couple of things, I realized, holy cow, how can I quit buying records when I don't even have a single Tom Waits LP in my collection? (not on vinyl, anyhow). I had enjoyed a few weeks of feeling like I'd gotten OFF the acquisition-of-stuff merry go round, and have in fact been a bit burned out on Tom Waits for awhile, but I don't deny his genius, and he once meant a great deal to me, so suddenly that peaceful non-acquisatory vibe I had been trying to cultivate was gone. Plus by re-acquiring one of his records (which actually did require a small cash outlay, since I didn't get as much as I'd hoped for the records I'd sold), I'd come close to filling up my Red Cat stamp card... how can I quit when I just have two stamps left to go...?
This posed a further problem: how can I buy just one Tom Waits record, when there are four of five that I actually really loved, back in the day? I would have to get Rain Dogs, first, because that was the album that hooked me on him, that I bought when it came out...
...but what about Frank's Wild Years, The Black Rider, and Bone Machine? I could probably make do without Swordfishtrombones, or his early work... except maybe Heartattack and Vine... Hmm...
And speaking of Bone Machine, how can I stop collecting without having a single Pixies LP in my collection?
I should never have gone back into Red Cat that day. I went in feeling fairly safe in my resolution, thinking I'd just flip a couple things for one other record, and emerged twitching with the need for at least six or seven more records, which continued to haunt me for days...
It almost becomes like smoking cigarettes as a way of quitting smoking cigarettes: you can justify smoking that next cigarette because it's YOUR LAST ONE, right? Because it's better to smoke a cigarette if it's your final one than if it's just one more cigarette in an endless series of cigarettes. So if it's in fact your last cigarette, that's okay! One last one and then you're done!
And then the satiation passes and the cravings hit and suddenly you're thinking about lighting just one more... THAT can be your last cigarette, right? If it's really the last, then that's okay!
Right?
How many "last cigarettes" are you allowed to smoke before you have to call bullshit on yourself?
Anyhow, I'm all twisted up now, because I figured, having gone into Red Cat, and realized that, okay, I'm going to have to feed the hungry eye one more time, I went one more step and sold a record that I had two of, a kind of nice item that I enjoyed owning, because it would allow me to get a couple Tom Waits and Pixies records, which would be the fastest way to stop myself from continuing to think about wanting them... a memorable purchase that I could END things on, you know? And I was still just trading things in, which I was allowed to do.
...only now I have an offer on the second of the two copies of said nice item, which I hadn't intended to sell at all. It might mean getting a couple of other Waits and Pixies records, and it would compensate a bit for the fact that I indeed spent a little MORE money than I'd gotten for the record I had sold... and it would kind of teach me a lesson that by opening the door to buying more stuff -- well, it wouldn't be the Grim Reaper, exactly, waiting on the other side, but I would LOSE something in the process, and maybe that would help me to stop?
How do I stop? Can I credibly use a final-cigarette/ one-last-heist-and-then-I'll-retire narrative to justify continuing to do exactly the thing I am trying (allegedly) to quit doing? It's almost like some perverse variant on Zeno's Paradox... How do I break this habit, of wanting to draw things towards me, of wanting to own them, control them? What drives it? Why can't I just be happy with what I AM, without needing to connect it to what I HAVE?
Anyhow, I don't actually really want to sell this other record at all, except the guy who wants to buy it wants it for a reason that kind of moves me (as a gift for someone), which actually seems more inherently meaningful than my mere (meaningless?) continued ownership of it. I just like the idea of continuing to own it... like my OWN pleasure in ownership, even as I am tempted towards facilitating his pleasure (he actually wants it as a gift for someone, so it would be TWO people getting pleasure from it, one form of pleasure -- pleasure in giving -- is actually superior, innit, to pleasure in owning. But why should that seem more valid to me? Why should my own continued ownership seem less meaningful than the act of facilitating someone else's ownership? (Is it the changing-hands-of-things that I'm addicted to, even more than the owning of them?). I'm all snarled up about it, and completely unconvinced that (maybe) by letting go of this object, it will make it a memorable lesson in NOT GETTING SO INVESTED IN THE OWNERSHIP OF STUFF.
Of course, the guy I'm thinking of selling it to is plenty invested in the ownership of stuff, himself. I wonder if he ever second-guesses that, if he ever thinks maybe he needs help?
Maybe I do? Maybe there are actually MORE IMPORTANT THINGS IN LIFE THAT I COULD BE THINKING ABOUT? Maybe all of this is just drama, and poor self control, and ultimately unworthy of the time I am devoting to thinking on it?
It did not seem this way this morning.
***
Post-script. I sold that other record, too. And bought all the Pixies and Tom Waits I really "needed." And now I'm gonna try to go back on the wagon... real soon...
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