Of our remaining vices - cigarettes and books - the latter are a much bigger problem. Cigarettes burn up conveniently, take up only molecular space in our lungs, and are happy to have their remainders tossed away when the good part is done. Books, though, stick around. They take up as much space when read as when unread. We know, we know, that we could always give away or sell the books we’re done with - but it feels like we’re never really done with them. We could use the library more often than we do, but the idea of not being able to immediately re-read something or look something up or just enjoy all the various spines looking out at us means that we’d rather own books than borrow them. Like we said, it’s a vice. So, indulging that vice whenever we can responsibly swing it, books accumulate. And, at some point having grown tired of living among vertical towers of books on the floor, we come to need a place to store them horizontally. We need a bookcase.
We’ll forgive you if you think that the problem - books - and the solution - a bookcase - are so clear and straightforward that they couldn’t possibly be worth thinking or writing about. Acquire books, acquire bookcase, assemble bookcase, place books in bookcase.
Easier said than done, though.
The first two parts are easy enough, sure. They sell books and bookcases in stores. They even deliver these things. Assembling is a different matter. While the Swedish furniture store probably has assemblers (is that what they’re called?) on staff ready to put a bookcase together for the low cost of “way too much,” we figured we were up to the task of doing it ourselves. How long could it take?
At least a month.
The month, to be clear, wasn’t spent assembling the bookcase, but rather “meaning to” assemble it. Meaning to do something is, for us, the most time intensive activity there is. We’ve been “meaning to” reply to an email for around six months now. We’ve been “meaning to” tidy up and clean out a closet for two years. We got a bill the other day that we will be “meaning to” pay until the day it’s due. When we think about it, “meaning to” read all of Proust has taken waaayyyy longer than actually doing so would have. It is wild how much time we spend putting off spending time on things.
We don’t, to be clear, put everything off. Regular activities or whatever don’t, for some reason, prompt us to procrastinate. Groceries and the like are habitual and easy. (Laundry is an exception because it is the worst set of activities ever engineered by god or man but this isn’t the place to get into all that.) Irregular activities, though, will cause unparalleled psychological and physical avoidance. For instance, lightbulbs. We will slowly, over years, live in a dimmer and dimmer world because lightbulbs will burn out and go unreplaced. We will, OF COURSE, “mean to” replace them - but won’t until, really, we start to question if we need to go to the eye doctor to check our vision and THEN - because we want to go to the eye doctor even less than we want to buy lightbulbs - we will go to to store (5 minutes away), acquire bulbs ($8 dollars each?), and replace them (less than 5 minutes). We know it doesn’t have to be this way, but we also know that it can’t seem to be any other way either.
Now, before you all start shaking your heads, raising your eyebrows, or diagnosing us with “depression” - you should probably know that the delay we inflict on ourselves isn’t ever because of the task itself. It isn’t that we believe ourselves unworthy or incapable of changing lightbulbs, cleaning a closet, assembling a bookcase - but rather that we’re low-key convinced that something will go incredibly and unusually wrong when we attempt to do these very mundane tasks such that these tasks spiral out of control and ruin us. Now that we’ve written that out, we know, that you’re probably tempted to revise your initial diagnosis in a more dire direction - but let us explain.
Take the bookcase, for example. Right now, it’s perfectly packed away in a box. Nothing can go wrong. We assume that everything we need for a bookcase is in this box and that, in some potential world, a bookcase will result shortly after opening the box and hammering (?) things.
BUT!!
What if not everything is in there? What if a critical screw is missing? Well, then we’re going to have to call the Swedes who sold this to us or, worse, go on the website a plead with a robot for a single screw. That doesn’t sound so bad? How would we describe this critical screw? We know nothing about assembling or screws. So, we’d struggle to find the word for the part and it would take forever and then we’d probably have to beg them to ship a single screw which (of course) they wouldn’t and then we’d have to spend a whole day getting out to the big blue store by the highway far from us and hope that a) that screw was in stock and b) that we could find a single screw (rather than a pack of screws that we don’t need) amidst all the stylish and affordable home furnishings. You see! This simple task could become an incredibly long and involved one.
MOREOVER, as you now know, we are prone to procrastinating with irregular tasks - so, say we had to get a screw at the store, this would take MONTHS to accomplish and in the meantime we’d have an unassembled bookcase gathering dust and sitting unsightly in a corner TESTIFYING to our incompetence and the general fucked-up-ed-ness of everything. And people would come over and ask about the unassembled bookcase and we’d have to tell them the whole screw story and then they’d offer to take us to the big blue store for the screw and then that, too, would take forever to organize (but there’s no backing out because it’d be a kindness and rude to decline), so now there are even more people involved in this fucking bookcase that - if we had our druthers - could have just sat perfectly in the box for eternity bothering no one.
You understand, we’re sure.
This, let’s call it, “psychological complex” can’t stand forever tho. Because the books, remember, accumulate.
So, for reasons we can’t explain or replicate, we sometimes decide to actually take on the irregular activity and confront whatever horrors follow. Today was one such day.
We didn’t remember that our bookcase had a name, but seeing it all sans-serif-y there was comforting. Billy wouldn’t cause us trouble. Billy only means well. If it were a William or a Bill, who knows? Will? Definitely. But not Billy. Billy would never hurt us. We tried not to obsess over the plastic sac of miscellaneous parts (inevitably missing a screw!) and consulted Billy’s Guide (which is what we took to calling the instruction manual).
Billy’s Guide, discomfitingly, opens with like six pages of warnings in every conceivable language. We flipped quickly through those warnings without reading them (because we didn’t need more anxiety at this moment) and stopped when we hit pictures.
This is precisely the kind of thing we were worried about. It wasn’t a screw we were missing, but a nude friend sporting a pencil behind their ear. There was no turning back, though. We were now frowning, holding a hammer, naked before our planks of wood, and we weren’t about to be stopped. The Swedes could cancel us if they wanted. We continued through Billy’s Guide solo.
We took this as an invitation to reflect on how practical labor is a bulwark against the abyssal void of meaning that existentially haunts human affairs. Took a few deep breaths. Emptied our mind of distractions like desire. Flipped the page and did what we were told to do.
Despite our incredible trepidation, it took like 15 minutes to get to this point. Billy’s Guide was very helpful and we had everything we needed (SO FAR!!). It was hard to conceive why a naked friend would be necessary for any of this. We wouldn’t say no to a naked friend, but they’d have very little to do here. Maybe they were meant to be around for amusement and moral support? Unknown.
It was at this point that we started to feel silly for having spent weeks not doing this very simple task. But, then again, everything was going right. The Swedish gods were smiling on us today and, as you well know, Swedish gods are a capricious sort. It was very possible that this went horribly wrong and we’d be writing about how we were bleeding and vulnerable and still surrouded by vertical book stacks and now lived amidst particle board forever. This alternate possibility was just as real as the actual reality.
Much as we’d like to, we can’t use this one successful instance of “things going fine” as grounds for the belief that “things will go fine” in the future. We’ve read Hume. We know about the complications of deriving effects from causes, the unpredictability of the universe. No. This is an isolated, near miraculous, event. We maybe have learned nothing from it, but we did gain a bookcase.
While much better writers would use an occasion such as this to talk about their books and their relationship to their books (like Benjamin in “Unpacking My Library”), much better writers don’t (we imagine) have to assemble bookshelves without a naked friend or on a day with 234908% humidity. We’ll spare you, then, talk of all the words on pages that are going to sit here waiting to be re-read or consulted or acknowledged. The important thing is that we built something out of nothing (ok, not really, but it sounds better than “built something out of all the pieces of that something”) and that this something, this bookcase, will now slip into the background of our life never to be acknowledged directly ever again. Both it and our labor making it will more or less disappear from our conscious mind even when, in the future, we again have too many books stacked on the floor and require again a bookcase and delay again to build it and worry and panic and make deals with Swedish gods all over again forever until we die.
And when we die, still in the middle of undoubtedly “meaning to” do something or another, we hope that the coffin assembler doesn’t suffer the same psychological complexes we do and can build a nice coffin with a naked friend without any anxiety or worry. And that our loved ones and friends, cursed with receiving our books, already have shelfspace enough to house them or, more appropriately, find homes other than theirs suited to their vicious bulk, or just trade them for the simpler, less cumbersome pleasures of cigarettes.
"Much as we’d like to, we can’t use this one successful instance of “things going fine” as grounds for the belief that “things will go fine” in the future. We’ve read Hume. We know about the complications of deriving effects from causes, the unpredictability of the universe. " Therein lies the crux of the problem as we see it, and the solution might be the naked friend. A naked friend can help us navigate the unpredictability of "cause and effect". As usual I loved this. The bookcase looks great and we're still talking about it ;)
Well done!. I am sure books on a bookcase are more convenient than stacked somewhere in a closet, on a floor, on a table, etc. I know most of us have used foul language against the naked Swedish guy. Can’t wait for the next piece of Swedish furniture to be assembled.