QED

I think a lot of people save things just because it is easier than throwing things out.  There is that sentimental stuff, but in a way that has a use, every now and then you can drag it out and get misty eyed looking at it.

It wasn't so much saving things that I was making fun of, it was your reference to guns as sacred objects.  Maybe that was just a casual phrase that you plucked out of your mind without thinking about it too much, but it just struck me as an odd way to think of a tool that is no longer of use.

I've never had an easel.  Watercolorists paint with the paper flat on a table because water does not resist the law of gravity the way oils and acrylics can.  But if I had one I think you said I wouldn't toss off an old one as long as it still worked, and maybe not, but the point is that you hang onto guns that don't work.  I think it's nutty enough to have several that do work, but you never know when those commies come over the hills Old Betsy might jam and you will be glad you have Old Cindy and Old Dorothy, that still work, but what the hell good will be Old Evangelina and Old Floradora who don't?  You will be better off with Old George the bowling ball, who as I pointed out earlier will never wear out and you can just roll them at the commies charging down in that triangular fashion on your freehold.

Oh embarrassing, what do I do with my old paintings that don't sell?  You mean the 99.99 percent?  Fortunately watercolor paper lies flat and I have five units of plastic shelving, so I'm probably good for the rest of my life.  One time in watercolor class I was showing some of my early work and I brought in maybe a dozen of my early paintings that I had spent hours laboring over, and then on the way back I left them on the train and never recovered them, and I felt terrible about it for like five minutes and then I thought well what the hell.  You can think of a painting as a priceless work of deathless art, or you can think of it as a used up piece of paper.

Oh there are people who collect stuff, and of course there are rich people who have all kinds of crap, and then there are hoarders who everybody already agrees are crazy.  And there are probably a few people who will hang onto an old motorcycle or boat or something.  But there is no group, no group, that consistently hangs onto tools that don't work anymore like gun nuts, and that just goes to prove that they are all crazy.  There, QED.

Oh yeah, there were times when I got static for looking like a hippie.  Every now and then I would be strolling down the streets of my neighborhood and some old coot would stick his head out the window and yell, "Hey you, get a haircut, get a job, join the army."  There were some hippies who liked to, I don't know, wear extreme hippie clothes and act goofy to freak out the squares, but I never got into that shit  I just wanted to look like a hippie to show my opposition to the status quo and the unpopular war and antiquated drug laws, and shit like that, which was pretty stupid too, I will admit.

What's interesting too, is that some people, like those freak out hippies, like to be part of the out crowd and thrive on the disapproval of the in crowd, as if that somehow validates them.  But sometimes that disapproval isn't because of what they believe in or how they dress, but just because they are different from the majority.  Like Old Man Fochman, probably didn't care if you were a hippie or college student or a Coastie, the fact was that you were not one of the founding fathers of Cheboygan or whatever he thought he was, and the reason he didn't want your car in his parking lot was that he was afraid your ilk, whatever it was, was planning on taking over the town.