The "Right" Stuff

It's not that we don't have stuff.  To the contrary.  This farmhouse is exploding with stuff.  I give away and throw away truckloads of stuff, and still we have way too much.  We have so much stuff that there's barely room for us in this joint.  So why are we constantly going out to buy more stuff, to haul back here and add to the groaning, teetering piles we already own?  My kids could tell you.  It's because none of what's crammed in here is the right stuff. 

The movies--seen 'em.  The music--so yesterday.  Our TV and computer are hopeless.  We can't play Blue-Ray discs.  We have nothing Hi-Def.  Our screens are concave.  Our webcam isn't built-in. Our speakers aren't surround.  Every single person in our house over the age of 12 comes equipped with an inferior cell phone.  Why can't we have Razrs?  Why can't we have Blackberries?  It's just tragic, that's what it is. 

The furniture in the farmhouse is worn and unravelling.  The carpet is repulsive.  The dishwasher doesn't get the dishes clean.  I bought the vacuum cleaner that is guaranteed 100% for life to never lose suction.  It sucks. Weakly. 

Even the nail polish my 13-year-old daughter bought yesterday is the wrong kind.  She meant to get the Diamond Tough Nourishing and ended up cursed with Triple-Last Satin Enamel.  And while we're on the subject, she owns 35 pairs of earrings, not one pair of which she'd be seen dead in.  They are all un-hip. 

Once upon a time, even the junk in our attic was the right, or at least the wrong-but-tolerable, stuff.  When it broke, or became old, it was retired to the attic and replaced by updated right stuff, which almost instantly turned into outdated wrong stuff.  It's amazing how the right stuff is almost never IN MY HOUSE.  It is forever OUT THERE, in Wal-Mart or at the mall or online, or tantalizingly laid out for our admiration in catalogues and magazines.  We fork over and shell out for, and buy on credit, this elusive right stuff.  We drag it home.  By the third payment of that 12-months-same-as-cash installment plan, it's all wrong.  Something else would be much better. 

We own the wrong X-Box, and $600 worth of the wrong X-Box games.  The right X-Box (with games) is at Wal-Mart, and next year that will be the wrong X-Box.  It goes without saying that we drive the wrong mini-van.  If a vehicle is paid for--if you don't owe at least 20 grand on it--it is so hideously wrong that your children are ashamed to be seen in it. "Thank God for tinted windows!" mine moan, and ask me to park in secluded areas. 

We even watch the wrong TV channels.  The movies and shows we would kill to see are displayed seductively at the tops of blank screens with telephone numbers.  I need to call those numbers to get those channels added to our DirecTV bill--which, at $52.00 a month, is too low.  So is our Embarq bill, because the high-speed internet that was the right speed three months ago is sluggish now.  The right bills (the ones I should be paying to get the right stuff) are much higher, and I can barely afford to pay the bills for the hopelessly inferior crap we own (and subscribe to) already. 

We are smothering in plenty and woefully deprived. 

Sometimes I peer into the attic at the piles of broken/obsolete sports equipment, furniture, and electronics, and wish I could pay to have it all hauled off to a landfill.  Then I remember how full the landfills are already and I suspect that I should be able to do something resourceful with all that junk (ex-right stuff).  There are raw materials in my attic, wood and plastic and electronic components, but where and how were they put together?  Can I go and confront a factory worker in Hong Kong and ask how this junk was assembled, and out of what, and how in the world it can be re-tooled into the right stuff again?   I imagine Playstations and X-Boxes on top of Ataris, soon to be covered in Wiis, piled by the tens of millions halfway to heaven.  Can we climb that stairway that we're buying, á la Led Zep?  Maybe we could use them as bricks, and build doghouses or something. 

My great-grandparents made and remade and made over and made do with their stuff. I pine for, buy at obscene expense, become disenchanted with, and pollute the earth with mine.  Or I store stuff for decades and bruise my shins stumbling over it--and either way, I feel guilty about it.  But I can't worry about pollution or clutter control right now, because I need to go buy a new ironing board.  The old one was door-mounted and I lost one of the brackets.  Great-granddad would have rigged up something to make the old one work, or built a new one, but I don't know how.  So the old one goes in the attic, and I buy a new one for $15.  The ironing board I want--which I believe to be the right ironing board--costs $40. 

In my defense, at least I iron.  Ironing is a dying art.  My friends no more iron their clothes than they wax their linoleum floors.  My friends give wrinkled clothes to the Goodwill.  If it's wrinkled, it's wrong. 

Like the blue jeans I'm wearing right now.  They are wrinkled--and wrong. They are loose, not tight.  They cover the stomach (a heavenly grace, for us matronly types).  They do not go all the way over my heels at the bottom.  They are, my kids say, "Dork-O."  And so are theirs--this season. They were "hot" last season.  I may be Dork-O, but they are both Dork-O and soon to be broke from buying yet another $60 pair of mall jeans.  I say these are the right jeans.  They fit. 

However, "fit" is a strange word nowadays. It implies contentment, as in "a good fit."  In 21st-century America, there are no good fits.  Today's good fit is tomorrow's trash.  Resourcefuness and contentment--making do with what you have--is as passé as last year's X-Box.  Even if a parent manages to ignore the advertising and cultivate happiness with her possessions here and now, the culture conspires to make her children miserable with longing.  The time lag between "right goods and services" and "wrong goods and services" goes down to the blink of a consumer's jaded eye.  The right stuff becomes your neighbor's stuff that you cannot afford.  We spend our whole lives eaten up with envy, chasing that right stuff.  Thou shalt covet, modern child, and thou shalt never stop coveting this side of the grave.