A couple of quotes to stand in for actual writing

Living in the United States is just a hot mess right now. It's actually terrifying if I allow myself to think about it all too much. To the rest of the world, I'm so sorry. There are good people here, but there are so many other evil ones it can feel hopeless. Some days I have to spend some time hiding away in my studio working on things that are simple but require just enough attention to keep the hamster off his wheel inside my head. Today was one of those days and I have a few more bits done on my English paper piecing project. 

It also means that what I really want to write about, because being silent is the same thing as tacit approval, I just don't have the emotional reserves to do so. If I were to try, it would be a very expletive filled post. I'll spare all of us that and share a couple non-expletive filled quotes that I came across this past week in my reading. 

The first is from the book Shopkeeping: Stories, Advice, and Observations by Peter Miller. (This is one of those books I picked up merely because I liked the look of it. I don't think I will ever own a shop. My stint in retail probably cured me of any desire I might have had.)

"I wanted to carry a radio I had seen in Copenhagen. It was on prominent display in the wonderful Illums design store, in a dozen different colors. I had thought, naturally, that it was from Denmark. I'm fact, it was from a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.    [I'm omitting the longer story of him being able to sell the radios. Eventually they were able to connect, which is where I pick up the quote.]

We made an arrangement. I said I wanted all the colors -- they said all the colors were only sold in Europe." (p. 120)

Peter Miller did end up getting to sell the different colors. What struck me was, well, a few things. Why don't Americans get fun colors? Why must everything be monochromatic greige? How does this play into Pantone choosing essentially white as their color of the year? Why are we content with this? 

When I first came across this part of the book, I thought I would use it to make some cogent argument for conditioning and mass consumerism. That's not going to happen, so you'll just have to do it yourselves. This is also one reason why I'm so interested in learning to make things myself. If I can make something I'm not at the mercy of what some huge multinational thinks is best for me. 

This leads in nicely to my second quote from Craftland: in search of lost arts and vanishing trades by James Fox. I've just started it, so this is from the introduction. 

"As the country [England] transitioned to the service sector, from a producer society to a consumer society, the 'workshop of the world ' lost the vast majority of its workshops.

The industrial and de-industrial revolutions extinguished thousands of manufacturing occupations, some of which had been practiced on these shores for centuries. Spare a thought for the ballers, benders, blubbermen, bogeymen, boners, bottom stainers, cock-makers, devils, eye punchers, faggotters, fiddlers, flashers, flirters, pom-pom men, quarrel-pickers, snobs, whiff-makers, and willy men whose once respectable livelihoods now sound like vulgar nicknames. Most of those jobs died out long before you or I were born. But the process that brought about their disappearance hasn't yet reached its conclusion. As we continue to modernize and globalize, as ever more analogue processes are digitized, as artificial intelligence does to our workforce what machines did to the Victorians, many traditional practices face a similar fate. 

According to Heritage Crafts, an organization that monitors threatened trades much like the World Wildlife Fund tracks imperiled species, 285 traditional crafts are still practiced in Britain. More than half are endangered -- seventy-two of them critically so. Some are sustained by just one surviving practitioner. In each of these cases a whole strand of our heritage hangs by a fraying thread, contingent on the fate of a single person." (pp. 10-11)

Not terribly cheery is it? It makes me think that not only are we loosing sets of skills that had been honed over centuries, but I think we are also losing how to live. I don't think we humans are designed to have everything we want immediately arrive on our footsteps. I don't think we are designed to have so much stuff, especially so much stuff the production from which we are completely separated. I don't think we are designed to live with so much convenience. Sure, some modern things are good... modern medicine and vaccines, indoor plumbing and clean water, refrigerators and washing machines... but sometimes I wonder if there is a point if it is all too much of a good thing. 

On that happy note I shall leave you all and go help L. bandage the chicken's foot. Still.