Our disposable culture, book dreams
For the last couple of years, Christina and I have enjoyed the use of our
Black and Decker Floorbuster. In an apartment as small as ours, a full-sized vacuum cleaner is impractical to store and use – we just don't need that much. The Floorbuster is perfect – small, cordless, and still powerful enough to suck up cat hair and the other junk that collects on our already miserable carpet.
Last night the Floorbuster began to emit an awful burning smell as Christina was vacuuming something up. We figured some cat hair had gotten into the belt, or something like that. So Christina broke out the screwdrivers and took it apart. What she found was the motor, smoking away as if it were puffing a cigarette. So much for cleaning some cat hair out of the belt.
So what to do with the Floorbuster? I couldn't even find repair information for it on the web, and in any case it would almost certainly cost more for the labor to fix the darn thing than we paid for it in the first place. ($35 at the Black & Decker Outlet in Lake Park, GA.) Replacing it will cost about $40 at Target. Add the time and effort of finding a B&D repair shop in St. Pete and I think we've already topped the $40 mark. So into the dumpster with the old Floorbuster. Thanks for all the, uh, sucking.
The book galleys arrived yesterday. The books themselves should be here today or tomorrow. Finally having a bound version of our work in hand gave me all sorts of neurotic dreams, a talent I think I inherited from my mother. (I remember some of the descriptions she used to give of her dreams: the strange Chicano family that insisted she was a part of it, or the contact lenses I was fitted with that resembled the undersides of an egg carton.) My dream involved going to the storage unit to check on the printed books, only to find that the storage place was undergoing a renovation. The contents of all of the units were arranged roughly in order, so it wasn't too hard to find my stuff, especially once I made it through the building in which a book fair was taking place. Once I got to the books, I discovered that the printer had subsituted a different picture on the cover, made the book twice as thick as I expected (without actually increasing the page count), and inserted all sorts of strange photos that had nothing to do with the book's content. For some reason, the proprietors of the Mailboxes Etc. where I receive all of my other packages were there – I guess I just associate them with the receipt of packages now – and they insisted on sharing all their stories of disappointing mail order experiences.
Of course, none of this will come to pass. The Safe-Stor storage place will take delivery of a dozen or so boxes today or tomorrow and I'm sure they'll look fine, but this is the level to which this project has infiltrated my head. It's a sickness, I tells ya. A sickness.
In the meantime, I'm waiting on delivery of our Stomp Tokyo letterhead from iPrint. Seems I tried to get too fancy with their online design software and wouldn't have gotten the results I wanted. It took them a month to figure this out, naturally. But I've been happy with their products and pricing in the past, so I ordered some simpler letterhead from them. When it comes we'll start mailing out galleys and sample copies big time. Anyone wanna help lick envelopes?
0 comments
