HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#229 :: Old Sign

Estate sales are gloomy experiences. I rarely check them out, and when I do, I am always reminded of why that is: it's not that dead people's things are for sale. It's that 50 or 60 years from now, someone else will fondling objects at my estate sale. It's not a someone-just-walked-over-my-grave feeling. It's resentment. Why are these fleshly vehicles ours for a limited time only? We take so long and work so hard building the people we become - or trying to figure out what the hell it is that we're building, that our bodies begin failing us before the job is finished and just as we're starting to get the hang of it. Mortality's a right skullfuck. You can keep going on momentum or faith, or comfort in your progeny, or the durability of one or two things you've created in life. But this vital glimmer - the pattering sound and feel of these keys beneath my fingers, the whisper of the CPU fan, the screen's flat glow, the animal flow of thought - doesn't belong to me in the long run. I'm just renting it.

Not intending tonight to be a rant on the fragility of life, but my skull hurts where the tooth lived until yesterday afternoon. And this enameled metal sign, an estate sale find, kicked some of the sand out of my gears. The hole drilled in the middle of its top edge lets it be hung from a chain or string behind the glass door of a shop and flipped to tell the world whether to come in or try again later. The letters, in a gorgeous, blocky font, are laid on in reflectorized paint. It lives over our dining room door, always declaring, "OPEN."