Have you ever created a reason to walk door-to-door, meeting your neighbours, greeting strangers who have internal imagery that defines their perfect center of the universe in domiciles that may or may not define domestic bliss?
In my door-to-door adventures, I asked for Halloween candy; have sold: raffle tickets for junior high school sock hops, desk lamps and other catalog items for Cub/Boy Scout projects, candles and oranges for high school marching band trips, mini-encyclopedias for college spending money; delivered free telephone books; taken survey information for the 2010 U.S. Census.
In the forty or so years of these face-to-face encounters, I have seen houses full of African violets, mobile homes full of marijuana plants, dog/cat feces all over the floor, spotlessly-clean living rooms (implying there was little in the way of living going on in them), ethnic diversity in areas where homogeneity was most coveted, souvenir dinner plates covering walls, people answering the door in a variety of [un]dress and people being as quiet as they can, refusing to open the door.
Do you know the official history of the spot where you call home, even if it’s a carpark where your Travelers’ caravan sits temporarily?
I am a vagabond of thought patterns, meandering from place to place, committed neither to one thought pattern nor another, aware of the vanity that goes with believing any one thought set is a permanent solution to anything in particular.
I have a childhood drawing with three names on the bottom: Rick Hill, Jeff Garwood and Suzanne Trimble. I guess the drawing was made sometime between the third and sixth year of primary school.
I know the first person very well, have lost touch with the second person and the third person is about to spend seven months in Germany for reasons unknown to me.
However, these three people well represent the types of people I met in my door-to-door wanderings as a child encouraged to impress himself upon his neighbours to exchange labour credits/money for goods/services.
I painted houses, mowed lawns, raked leaves and helped friends in their newspaper delivery routes to provide myself the economic power to participate in the local marketplace during my teenage years.
I suppose children are still providing these services to put spending money in their pockets and deposits in their bank accounts, a few of them buying stamps, comic books, dolls or other collectibles and/or government savings bonds and company stock for investments.
Broken-balsa-wood-and-torn-tissue-paper windup-rubber-band-powered airplanes sit atop dusty stacks of books around me.
A rusty model rocket launch pad rod sticks up out of shopping bag labeled “CIRCUSWORLD TOY & VIDEO CENTER.”
A telescope points toward the ground.
On a pile next to me rests a wire kitchen strainer once used as a parabolic wireless network signal concentrator/reflector.
These items serve as keys or bookmarks for memory locations inside my body.
The generic brick-and-mortar, vinyl-sided, stacked-box objects we call home serve as memory locations for inhabitants, too.
A cave or a bamboo hut.
An adobe hacienda or stone castle.
We are rarely aware of the network of memory locations within us that are triggered by external objects like our homes and their contents.
Is your home rich with memories, both good and bad?
Or, like some of the sterile environments I observed when going door-to-door, is your home mostly unused, filled with objects about which you have little memory recall, the TV and computer serving more as an extension of your thought set than the furniture and facsimile paintings on the walls?
A fellow blogger posted that her friends find her boring. It’s a matter of perspective. How imaginative is the thought set of the blogger? How rich are her memories of growing up?
The Internet has opened the gates that once allowed only the most persistent, imaginative people to appear in mass media.
Now, everyone with a computing device (computer, tablet or mobile phone) can appear in a one-person off-Broadway autobiographical show — a slice of life with no beginning or end, no plot, no climax, just a character carrying on about whatever it is that character wants to put on display.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité. E pluribus unum.
On a side note, is it just me or does the US FTC (Federal Trade Commission) emblem look like the mask that some of the global protestors have been wearing?:
treetrunkdings 