Adam Blatner

It doesn’t have to be a magic ring that could make you invisible if you wore it—and which imparted a kind of “high” that made you want to wear it a lot—, as it was for the weird frog-man character, “Gollum”  in the Hobbit stories by Tolkien.  It can be a plastic ring that you pull off under the screw cap on the modern milk carton, that you could wear as a ring. Precious. Pretend.

In my day, little containers were precious.  Even what today they give out in restaurants for take home carriers of sauce. Those little plastic containers with plastic lids back then could be used to store beads, or coins, or doodads that you find on the street. Maybe we could weave them into, oh, I dunno; .. or make badges… or pin on hats.

My wife comes in with a top to cleansing wipes. Part of her is like an utterly charming little lid. This doohickey has a hinge on it, so it’s could be imagined to be a door.

They’re upping the ante on “precious.” In the olden days trash was something that no way could be used by anything, but nowadays disposables have introduced a whole level of potentially useable as a toy if we could figure out how, maybe part of a crafts project. As a kid we would have attached that thingamabob to a cardboard box and it would have been a door of a mouse house or some other fantasy something.

They’re making it harder to escape hoarding, because even mundane stuff that is eminently throw-away-able is what used to be too precious to throw away. Funny!