material voyeurism

it's stuff person again

Facebook marketplace is always deciding what kind of person I am from my last six search terms and the versions of me that emerge are fascinating facsimile selves, people with smiles bent differently from mine and a fundamental fixation I can't help but almost admire. Sometimes it's just right and from there I hope to enter a positive feedback loop wherein its good algorithm serves to me constant quality postings and my likes of same fuel the algorithm to continue its positive delivery. This is an imaginary stasis I'm sure will never come to be.

Today someone is selling a printer’s table with sixteen type drawers for $400 in New Jersey and my little letterpress heart is aghast because I WANT IT

Somebody else has a fourteen foot measuring stick described as “taller than my garage” and marked off in increments of uncertain unit, clearly neither inch nor centimeter but even divisions of mysterious size, $100

There's a bench that might be from the 70s but is probably just painted like that and a bike pictured hanging from the ceiling and a perfect lucite purse which isn't fair because they KNOW I want that. In the recently sold, one of those 12 foot skeletons, pictured in a foyer, “used only inside.” The cameras and typewriters are better in New York than in Utah, there's more hardshell luggage and fewer antique sewing tables and one tufted rug with a pattern of snakes. I could live in here forever and never get anything done.

To call my interest in FB marketplace “shopping” would be to stretch the term; it's more a distant voyeurism that is oriented towards both entertainment and acquisition but mostly towards curiosity, as though if I scroll long enough I could consume into my consciousness every item there is, everything in every apartment, the ways everyone is living.

I message someone with a Graflex in New Haven and they don’t answer. I accidentally ghost the owner of a keyboard I want to buy because I get wrapped up in research and long walks with heavy bags across Manhattan and entirely forget they exist. I send to friends the links to items they want or that make me think of them; rarely purchased, the links fill the media memory of my phone.

Very Polite Christmas Penguin.

Porch Bear In Need of New Home.

Already I’ve said it, I’m a stuff person. I accumulate and discern. But immersion in material culture, if you want to get all academic about it, is joyous to me even when it is unfulfilled. What do people have and want, what are they getting rid of, why? What will they accept for it? What will I give?

My last computer had a folder on the desktop filled with screenshots from Craigslist, the weirdest items I found traces of, and sometimes not items at all: I remember most often the person looking for gossip, anyone’s gossip, and to be fair to them gossip at remove is at its best, sharp without touching the skin.

song of the day: Big Fish/No Fun by Rosie Tucker

cafe of the day: Picnic

art of the day: collage: Utah maps, copper mine, birds

color of the day: Pantone 13-0650 TCX (Sulphur Spring)

You think I’m just writing Stuff Person again don’t you? I mean did you think I’d only talk about it once, my bowerbird preference for muchness?

The first four items marketplace serves to me, uncensored, are: Silver Roller Skates, REI Overalls Brand New, Plantation Chairs, Brown “Smile” Chair. Restart the page and there is a cycle of furniture, real estate listings, photos pulled from official ecommerce sites, photos of objects held awkwardly in isolated hands before a phone camera. How does anyone decide when and how to take the photo? In the many cases in which you can hardly see the item at all, is the hope at deception or rather at the same kind of lazy giving-in on the part of the buyer as is experienced by the seller, an oh well that makes the present moment Good Enough?

Good Enough is one of those phrases that the hospital tried very hard to teach me; I would get in senseless tangles with my psychiatrist trying to explain to him that Good Enough is not….good enough. Perfectionism is something I am supposed to shed, and sometimes I let it drop from one shoulder like a loose jacket on a warm day, but it still catches in the crook of my elbow, breezes careless but close behind me. Despite the goodwill of the medical professionals, I harbor a less-than secret conviction that perfectionism is part of the fabric of me, and that there is something better, brighter, about people who share this trait. I’m not supposed to feel, and certainly not supposed to admit, such traitorous remnants. I tell myself all the old standards: perfection is the enemy of the good. And I can let it slip now, but Good Enough to me is title of a tragedy, a way of saying well, you tried, didn’t you, well, it’s a thing, sure enough. Little shake of the head and on to something better. There is a nobility to me in struggling through to the thing really worth having made. And yes, I know that I am trapped as in La Brea Tar by this compulsion, that one day tourists will gather round to see the ossified remnants of the impossible internal pressure that is, in the end, all I may come down to.

It is because of Good Enough that I can spend so long making decisions. Staring at every headlamp in REI and scrolling through reviews to make the right choice, frozen in the front seat of my car trying to decide where to go to coffee or dinner, or whether to just go home. It is also because of Good Enough that I sink so often through the Marketplace listings, because among all the good enough somewhere there is, sometimes, the Perfect Thing, for myself or for someone I love. Because even if we all make friends with Good Enough the shining instance of the Perfect can live for a moment in the material, and for that moment everything is easier.

I’ve been writing lately about the slippages I’ve been making through time, mostly forwards but sometimes back. Sometimes new events drag me into the past with the sharp pain of a fishhook through my hand, reeling me in. Sometimes it is just that time goes by so strangely, days and days and days until it is over, whatever it is, however much I wanted, when the time came, to have my eyes open. I have been writing this tangle while I was on the East Coast and aching, let it meander over the months since, through leap day and my half birthday, PMDD and repeated trauma, work and surfacing, up to a place where I can breathe. At the big table in the dining room, covered in materials for the collage I am meant to finish, the pages of my thesis and the readings for tomorrow, the camera filled with photos and videos of M, spirit bright and bigger than their body, too many cans and glasses from three days of hydration, from me and C who sat with me over dinner and different tasks, legible to each other only as the blank back faces of laptops, the sound of fingers on keys—at this table I am disinclined to bring to you the rage and mourning of the months I have been keeping track of, but I may, I still may.

Facebook thinks of me over the course of days as many other selves—the self who wants to buy only mechanical keyboards, the self who is obsessed with botanical art, the self deeply invested in finding obscure implements of printmaking or photography or who is dedicated to the possession of a rug-tufting gun—in the same way I know myself as multiple. I construct myself most mornings, pick a cartoon character off a hanger in my closet and decide who I am, today. Usually whoever they are, they do not live for more than say, eight hours, shed at some middle point when I adjust into a different self. The pink eighties dress I just sold to Iconoclad, the denim boilersuit, leggings and the cropped nike jacket, the sweatshirt from my church that I have never worn out of the house—these clothes have all fit on my body and on some version of the person perched inside my skull, turning by whim and circumstance into many makes of myself.

Did you think Stuff Person was the end of this whole paean to the things that are cluttering my bedroom enough to actually upset me, a mess that overwhelms me but that I can’t find time to tackle between the practical tasks that will beset me heavily til May? You can’t have thought that, I don’t believe you.

If you were the last six things you typed into google who would you be? Like I’m going to tell you mine, psh. I’ve told you already what Facebook thinks I am today, isn’t that enough for you? To know me as I know the world through the surf and wrack of items that are swept up on the beach around me?

Go and buy yourself some walnut and formica nesting tables, a lamp shaped like a seashell. Look for live cactus or a needlefelt fiber lamb labeled “My Light and Song.” Look for something perfect today, something absurd, screw your algorithm, make yourself into a falsehood worth wearing for the afternoon.

E

p.s. What is the best thing you’ve found on facebook marketplace?

p.p.s. Will you hire me to find the thing you’re looking for? To style your home? To send you the funniest links I can find? To be the talent scout of your material reality?

p.p.p.s. Don’t ask me about my thesis or tell me April is coming soon.