The Law of Familiarity

The law of familiarity. More on this idea.

Had recently stayed in the worst dirtiest sleaziest motel on South beach that you could ever imagine. Really gross but really cheap. Truth is that I am flat broke. Haven't been broke in over ten years, but I am now. but that's a different story. The point is that at first this hotel was so gross to me that I couldn’t even fall asleep. Couldn’t bear looking at it. but after a few nights I became accustomed to it. I just woke up one day and noticed that I was starting to feel comfortable there. and I have been thinking about this theory for days now. about how when you go to use a public restroom and someone has left something in the toilet for you because they didn't flush and how totally gross that is that it makes you want to throw up. but when you look at your own feces in the toilet you don't get grossed out at all. what is that? weird right? it’s just because we are already familiar with it. or at least because it is ours, it belongs to us, we tell ourselves that we are already familiar with it. it’s ours. but when we look at someone else’s feces in the toilet and because we tell ourselves that it is not ours and therefore we are not familiar with it, we imagine that there may be other things there that we may not expect or something.... or when we look at someone's hands and they look so foreign and strange to us, and yet when we look at our own hands they seem so normal. We see right through them almost; as if they are not even there. This is the law of familiarity.

The transfer of goods. While we were moving this weekend Bas gave away his old crate and barrel table and chair set that he had bought with his ex girlfriend a few years back. he just didn't want it anymore. So there the table sat on its side in the truck and the chairs one on top of the other, looking quite discarded and lonely. I asked the driver of the car what he was going to do with the set and he told me in a very broken English with a thick Jamaican accent that he would be giving them to these old ladies he knows who live in a trailer in his neighborhood. ‘They will love this table mon,’ he tells me, they will use to play cards in all day and night.’ I stood there and thought of the fate of our goods and wares. How they trade hands, going from person to person. how one year a table and chair set can sit in the window of crate and barrel and cost hundreds of dollars and a happy young couple can save their dollars and charge the set to their credit card and spend months and years paying it off, and then years later it can be given away for absolutely nothing to someone as if no one in the world cares about it. and yet, if the set really does wind up in the trailer of some nice old ladies who will sit there playing cards in them through their long and leisurly days.... its this transfer of our goods that is fascinating. And when one by one the old ladies pass on from this world, what next will happen to the table and chair set? When people rent and then they leave the rented property often times landlords just throw all the stuff out on the curb, which I have always found fascinating. How we can buy stuff and then throw it away.

When we moved our offices from the lavish 5000 sq foot building we once occupied to a much smaller executive office suite set up, we ended up with over twenty desks and chairs and computers and monitors and just tons of office furniture. Cleopatra casually advised to throw it all away. but I had been to used office furniture warehouses and I knew how much this stuff sold for. In fact much of this same stuff she was advising me to casually throw away we had spent thousands of our hard earned dollars on purchasing from these same used furniture warehouses. After storing the merchandise a while on my own dime I started calculating how much the warehouse fees were costing me each month to store this stuff that I may or may not ever use. You could go on and on. Its really a fascinating concept to think about.

I still have five boxes of approximately three thousand cassette tapes that I don't know what to do with. No one wants them. if you go to eBay to look up cassette tapes, they sell for pennies a tape. so they are truly an unwanted item, even though at one time I had paid probably over ten bucks a piece for them over the years. I even offered them to a few school who declined them because they said they didn't have cassette players. Unbelievable.

Same thing with records. I have thousands of them too. but word is that they will one day be collectable. So I don't spend much time worrying what to do with them. Collectable is the term used to describe our goods that we could throw away now because they have no value, or hang onto for twenty years because they will suddenly and mysteriously become valuable again, but not for the same reason. Again, fascinating.

I remember Mr. T, the ultimate junk man who at one time had over twenty warehouses of his own filled to the roof with what anyone else would call junk. He had some warehouses filled with nothing but just newspapers. At the time it seemed ridiculous. Especially when he would force me and the boys to transfer all the stuff from one warehouse to another. We always felt like it was a complete waste of time of course but for obvious reasons we were at his every beck and call. (is that right? or is it beckon call?) anyway, over time, he began to sell his old wares at auctions. Pretty soon he was selling newspapers from the seventies for hundreds of dollars per paper. and then he was selling old commodore 64kb computers from the early eighties that you couldn’t give away ten years earlier for hundreds of dollars. And it went on and on like that. he would sell old antique radios for thousands of dollars and he had this whole warehouse filled with old cars from his high school years ---- I'm talking a warehouse about the size of a football field --- filled with cars that he once owned and he others he bought for pennies that were just total heaps. And now he was turning around and selling them for tens of thousands of dollars per car. fascinating. This is the life of the intelligent junkman.

Yes, the transfer of our goods is a fascinating concept indeed.

At the airport now. sitting outside on a bench waiting to go through the gate. And I noticed I was connected to the Internet via a wireless network. Its amazing how you can connect to the Internet now from almost anywhere without even having an Internet connection of your own.
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Brought to us by the courtesy of Rob Breszny:

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change
 something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
  --R. Buckminster Fuller, *Critical Path*

 "No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an
 uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit."
  --Helen Keller

 "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
  --Ralph Waldo Emerson, *Essays: First Series,* "Essay XII, Art"