My Lamp and the End of the World

 

My lamp and the end of the world.
 
This apartment is huge and in a huge apartment you need a lot of lights. You walk away from one lit area and all of a sudden you plunge into darkness.

 

An old woman died and her son put her belongings on the lawn in front of her house. I scored a pot, an alarm clock, and a floor lamp.

 

The alarm clock was the first to go, after a few years of service. Spent days shopping for another alarm clock. I spend my dollars carefully and did not want to buy the wrong clock.

 

Appliance shopping separates the sheep from goats. Appliance shopping is the truest test of human virtue.

 

There's no such thing as throwing something away. There is no "away." We are all on the same planet and cheap, mass-produced appliances aren't going anywhere. they are leaking toxic metals into the groundwater.

 

So, yeah, buy a good alarm clock. One that will last.

 

After that, the old lady's floor lamp began shooting sparks at me. When the fire works progressed into smoke I figured I needed a new floor lamp.

 

(I still have the old lady's pot and it is my best pot for cooking rice.)

 

A very kind friend bought me the lamp you see pictured here. Got it at Walmart. Made in China, of course.

 

It immediately began to fall apart. The plug went first. Kind friend brought over a new plug and attached that.

 

Then the switch on the top element stopped working. You had to squeeze it ever so tenderly as if it were a cow's udder you were milking to get the light to go on. Only after many tries.

 

Finally the stalk separated from the base. The base is a concrete slab. The stalk rotated on the base and wore down the concrete, which leaked through the base leaving concrete droppings.

 

Boy did I need a new lamp.

 

But I really hate buying things. I hate throwing away plastic, which virtually never biodegrades. And, again, appliances are a difficult mix of electronic elements, plastic, concrete -- how to recycle?

 

I asked friends. do you know a place I can recycle this? No.

 

Or, why couldn't it just be fixed? No. It is not designed to be fixed.

 

Yes, you can design an appliance so that it can be fixed. We don't do that any more.

 

Dammit, I grew up with things that could be FIXED. Hell, in Nepal, there were people WHO FIXED FLIP FLOPS. Yes! Yes! Your flip flops wore out? That guy squatting in the dirt there. He can fix them. Just a coupla rupees.

 

I tried to find the kind of lamp they used to sell in my childhood. Ask any baby boomer. Appliances in our childhood were made to survive a drop from Niagara Falls.

 

There's a scene in Indiana Jones IV where he survives a nuclear blast by hiding in a 1950s refrigerator. Youngins scoffed at that scene. They're wrong. That's how sturdy appliances were back in the day.

 

I went to the Salvation Army. They had floor lamps. I plugged them in. None worked. And the Pakistani ladies who speak no English who staff the store were selling them. Shame!

 

I drove twenty miles to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore on route 10. Gigantic, chock full of stuff. No floor lamps. I checked out another HfH store. Again, no lamps.

 

I shopped Amazon and Ikea online. Didn't see anything that looked like the sturdy lamps of my childhood.

 

What can I say? I read a lot and I need a lamp I can shine right on the page so my aged, injured eyes can make out the increasingly small and blurry letters they use these days.

 

I did the unthinkable. I surrendered. I went to Walmart and bought this crappy lamp, again.

 

The newer version is, astoundingly enough, even crappier than the older version. Smaller. Uglier color. Much smaller base, so it will fall apart sooner.

 

And I'll have it throw it away again all over again, and on our shrinking planet, there is no "away."