Complex Numbers

More Than One Shot

I figured out long ago that everything -- well, almost everything -- that we humans create goes through four phases.

PROMPT November 2nd

Write about something you collect. If you don't collect anything, write about the collection of a friend or family member.

There are exceptions, of course. Perishables, for one; you want to consume those as fast as possible before they go bad. Strawberries, for example. After one day in the fridge, they become a biology project. Avocados have an approximately 15-second window between "too hard" and "rotten;" only once in my life have I seen a perfectly ripe avocado, and by the time I was done eating it, it was already turning black.

Art is another exception. Real art, great art, I mean, which can't be defined but "I know it when I see it." The Sistine Chapel ceiling is probably just as valuable now as it was when Mikey painted the sucker. Great care is taken to preserve works of art, because each is unique.

But for most mundane objects, the first phase is shiny and new and therefore valuable, while the second phase is when it's lost its luster and has become, in the common parlance, junk.

It's at the second phase that things get discarded, thrown away, scrapped, recycled. Few care about such objects, unless they hold some kind of sentimental value. Your mom throws away your comic book collection. You trade in your iPhone for the latest model and the earlier one becomes garbage. Entire neighborhoods are leveled to make way for a shiny new apartment complex or stadium, which, some decades from now, will in turn be demolished for something even newer and shinier.

But some things, should they survive, enter a third phase of their existence. Their contemporaries have mostly been destroyed, and they gradually become valuable again, for their uniqueness. And it doesn't matter what the book value of such a thing is. It could be a house, the last remaining example of its architectural style, a window into a bygone era. A street - when I was in Alexandria the other day, I walked along an alley of original cobblestones, preserved because there weren't many examples left of Colonial-era cobblestones. An antique automobile, all of the other vehicles from that long-scrapped assembly line having been wrecked or junked. Even something as relatively valueless as a beer can; I've seen entire collections of vintage beer cans, ones with pull-rings instead of tabs, even earlier ones that you had to use a pointy opener on.

It's always been my intention to preserve certain things through the second phase until they entered their third phase. My ex-wife put a stop to that. My stamp collection is gone. My book collection is severely diminished. I had a piece of the Berlin Wall that she thought was just another brick (cue Pink Floyd here), and a jar of fine ash from Mount St. Helens. All gone.

I can forgive her for a lot of things, but not for that.

Now, I'm the first to admit that I'm a bit of a hoarder, for that reason, but I've never kept old beer cans. I do have a couple of wine bottles of sentimental value, signed by the winemaker or something of that sort. But I do have a bit of a collection of shot glasses going on.

Shot glasses are easy to collect. They're generally not very expensive, and when I'm traveling, sometimes I'll pick one up at one of those tacky tourist shops. Dice on a glass from Vegas, or a seashell shot glass from Virginia Beach. A crude drawing of Bear Lodge (aka Devil's Tower) from a gift shop in Wyoming. One done in Navajo style that depicts the Four Corners location. Things of that sort.

I rarely use shot glasses, myself, and when I do it's a generic one just so I can properly portion out the ingredients of whatever alchemical concoction I get it in my head to try. Like, tomorrow, I expect to make a few that involve: two shot glasses' worth of vodka, one of Kahlua, one of Rumchata, pour into a glass with ice, top off with heavy cream. It's a riff on the White Russian so beloved of my role model, The Dude, from The Big Lebowski. Because it's an American creation with a Russian influence, I call it "The American Election," which is why I intend to throw a few together on Election Day.

Whether that will be to celebrate or drown my sorrows remains to be seen, but that's one of the many beautiful things about booze: it works for both.

But I digress.

There is, of course, the matter of the fourth phase. No matter how much we try, no matter what techniques we employ, even those items which have enjoyed some time in the third phase of their existence will, eventually, crumble into dust.

Some find that depressing. Not me. It means they're real, and to be celebrated. Things that are real will eventually pass into oblivion; anything that we think is eternal is but an illusion. Sure, some things will last longer than others (including, I would hope, my shot glasses, because glass is remarkably durable unless you break it on purpose), but eventually, entropy always wins. Until one day, far in the future, even entropy will stop and with it, time itself.

But that makes it all the more important to appreciate things while we have them.