April 2018 – HUMOR IS NO FUN UNLESS YOU LAUGH

JUST A STORY, BUT ADMITTEDLY CLOSE TO REALITY

Dear aunt Ella died, in her sleep. She was always good to us and she knew that we had an eye for art and sculpture. That is how we came to inherit her splendid collection of porcelain figurines. It so happened that we had an old cabinet with glass doors we had been thinking of selling or giving away. It was made of depressingly somber dark oak. But potentially it was perfect to display our new collection of figurines. It was not an expensive piece and the thinking was that it would not be a crime, esthetically speaking, to redo the cabinet in a lighter color. In other words, I was volunteered to paint it. It is a well- known fact that in homes where married people live “volunteer” is a transitive verb.

What color, though, would be right? A creamy white was one suggestion. I objected since the walls of the room are already creamy white. There would be no contrast. The cabinet would blend into the wall and visually disappear. My argument was accepted.

Red was mentioned. We already have a small red library or sofa table. But that red is so bland and diffused that it was impossible to find a matching chip in the paint store. And a bright red cabinet in the dining room? A little bit too much contrast, I thought. So that suggestion was discarded.

The original idea had been to paint the cabinet in a lighter color, to get away from dark colors. Blue was suggested. Some of us, me for example, thought that blue was a dark color unless you are thinking of powder blue. We were not thinking of powder blue, however. Defying logic, we were going to lighten up the room by painting the cabinet dark blue. Not dark dark blue, but not powder blue either. Lots of contrast with the wall, however.

It was almost fun to paint the plain wooden outside, two coats with a drying day between. But there were glass doors with ribs that were meant to simulate smaller panels. To paint 3/16 inches wide ribs without spilling any paint on the glass was a challenge, and it also had to be done twice of course. I did not let this bother me. I already had grey hair.

On to painting the inside then. To keep it light we selected, yes, a creamy off-white. The inside had no ribs to worry about and was finished in record time. The off-white inside of the cabinet contrasted beautifully with the blue outside. We should have measured the pieces first, but when we began to install our little collection we discovered that one of the precious figurines was just a little too tall to get her head under the shelves. The only thing to do, short of the guillotine, was to move one of the shelves. The shelves rested on cleats that had been installed by the manufacturer about ninety years ago. They did things solidly in those days. To move those cleats in such a way that the re-installed shelf would not wiggle or slope was a procedure I will not further describe lest my language offend any one.

But we got it done. Our beautiful figurines had a palatial new home. The figurines were mostly off-white and blended perfectly into the off-white interior of the cabinet. Absent contrast, they became virtually invisible.
What does one do in such situations, other than letting go a few nasty words? Get rid of Ella’s white figurines and buy our selves a bunch of blue ones was one idea, and it nearly landed me in divorce court. Or perhaps re-paint the inside of the cabinet blue, sacrificing the idea of lighting up the room in favor of more contrast for the figurines. That made sense. Off came the doors again, out went the figurines — careful, you (me?) broke a finger off one of them already! Take out the shelves. Paint the inside back panel of the cabinet blue, two coats, drying day between them. I was developing a routine. As I finished it was late and I was tired, and tired of painting.

I must have gone to bed but I do not remember that. I should have loved to hear what Professor Freud might have said to my dream that night: I was in my underwear, and in front of me I had a collection of little white figurines, lots of nasty little people with impertinent beady eyes, which I was angrily splashing with red glossy enamel. There, take this! Take that! And I was splashing a lot of red paint on myself in the process when my wife walked in and, thinking I was bleeding to death, let out the mother of all screams. Except it was actually me who was screaming in my sleep. Which woke my real wife up, wondering if I had lost my mind. I was too tired to explain.

Just as well, because another problem had arisen. It was all much too blue. So why don’t we take out the shelves again and repaint them cream color. Just the shelves, not the background. Well, maybe the side panels too. It would help lightening the room and would not diminish the contrast.
It was then that it occurred to me that a bunch of those nasty little red people with cream colored feet that I dreamed about would make a perfect display. Cram them in, a hundred of them, fifty to a shelf if need be. That should be enough contrast for anybody! I suppressed the urge to scream, however, and kept that idea to myself.

I don’t know how many reputable philosophers are on record as having said that the universe and even life itself are essentially absurd. The Bavarians, a sturdy tribe of Germans settled around the city of Munich, the city of beer where I once used to live, sum it up in one of their pithy sayings: “Saufst, schtirbscht; saufst net, schtirbscht ah!” It is hard to be so succinct in English but a reasonable translation would be “Drink too much you die, for shame; don’t drink at all, die all the same.”
Beer drinking is not one of the things that are foremost in my thoughts. But I also run into such absurdities in other contexts. The economy came to mind, the marketplace. There is no such thing as a perpetuum mobile. To keep things moving requires that you put something in. If everything stopped at the status quo antes there would be nothing to sell or buy. We would all be dead. Just losers, no winners.

If you are in commerce and you have something to sell you must find a way to attract buyers. And if you want more than a hand to mouth break-even existence you need many more buyers in order to buy more things to sell to even more buyers. It is a veritable chain reaction until we run into limits. Now we have a dilemma: everything we buy creates waste, pollutes, or harms us in other ways and we would want to cut back, not consume so much. But suppliers can’t survive unless we consume stuff. Most of us grew up believing that there are no limits. The power companies, for example, helped us to think of more ways to use more of the energy they sold. I remember a Southern California Gas Company presentation of the then new icemaker refrigerator where the young lady presenter showed us novel ways to use ice cubes. Put them in drinks; use them for compresses if you burn yourself; give them to houseplants for easy watering, and so on. More consumption was thought to be good for the economy.

Today, though, the limits are obvious. The power company now offers us advice on how to save on energy, i.e. to save money by saving energy. It’s a noble thing to do, of course, but it strikes me as absurd when a supplier urges consumers to consume less. Ultimately, of course, this hurts the supplier. Business shrinks. Employees become surplus humanity on food stamps. We are sorry for those workers and start looking for scapegoats. At election time voters prefer politician who promise to save their jobs. As if any politician had the slightest idea how to do that. The more efficient we become the worse it gets. Should a factory now scrap their robot machinery and hire people instead? They cannot afford people unless they outsource to a poorer country where labor is cheap. But that is not what angry voters want. They want their own old jobs back. And those jobs do not exist any more. The economy, I say, is absurd.

I take a pill every evening. It controls my symptoms. I buy refills every month. It is an ideal situation for the supplier. But I, the patient, would like a pill that cures me, that leaves me with no more symptoms to control. It would be ideal for me but counterproductive for the producer of my trusty daily pill, obviously.

When I am sick I see my doctor. Sick people are the stock in trade of physicians and hospitals. Healthy people less so. We all deserve praise for professing to embrace the idea of preventive medicine. But what if we all turned out to be perfectly healthy tomorrow morning? All of us, except the few that get involved in accidents. They will not generate enough income for more than a few doctors and one hospital per town. I see a paradox in that. Physicians do not know yet how to make us all well. But should they find a way, their own existence would be endangered. Some dilemma.
On the other hand, it has all happened before. When the automobile made the horse obsolete all drovers, farriers, and horse traders lost their jobs. Even the horse butchers of Paris slowly disappeared. I remember two of them on rue Chappe in the 18th arrondissement. In the late Forties one still had a shop sign in the form of a horse’s head, a tête de cheval, signifying the nature of his business. Most of these shops are gone now. Their supply of merchandise has dwindled, and so have the customers. But as far as I have been able to determine life goes on. A few doors down the street from where the horse head used to hang you find today the busy Cafe de Chappe. Prominently displayed on the menu the owner lists his Steak à Cheval, a very common item in Parisian brasseries consisting of an egg straddling a ground beef patty “like a rider on a horse.” I am not sure but I think he meant this as a joke. I have convinced myself that, while sad, it is a hopeful sign that most young people cannot possibly ‘get’ this splendid pun. As it did on rue Chappe, life goes on everywhere, at least in the short run. Was not Charles Darwin in the 1830’s worried about Thomas Malthus’ prediction, namely that there was no room for more people? And is it not now two hundred years later? And isn’t Malthus just about the last thing we worry about in our day to day lives? Bless Alfred E. Neuman and his dictum: “What — Me Worry?”. Yes, that’s us. I suspect that there is method in Mad.

Month: April 2018

Figurines

Winner, Losers