Priceless

Funny how senseless hope can be sometimes. Like a funeral procession I make several loops around my apartment building last night, scanning over the same cars I see everyday. A brisk, 21 degree New England frost creeps up the window as my chapped thumb clicks buttons labeled “PANIC” and “OPTION” because a car alarm clicker I’m friends with had lost its partner. My car was stolen last night. A gorgeous, restored, custom 1995 Acura Integra GSR. 190k miles, but you’d never know it. Bounced you around like a bad pilot on approach, but you loved it. Problem after mechanical problem, but you fixed it.

I believe strongly there are things in this world that you cannot attach a price to. That objects can become more than the sum of their parts, that great design inspires great experiences, that inanimation gains life through knowing, better than the user him/herself, what it is ultimately designed to do. This car had a life. A graduation gift from my father, it was priceless not because of performance, handling or looks, but because it represented something a father I was only beginning to know at the time spent so much of his time and energy to find… for a time in my life that I worked so to make it through… in a way only it could deliver.

Someday science will catch up to reality. Engineers will invent materials that have a life of their own. Steel frames with a heartbeat, locatable by GPS anytime, anywhere. Someday they’ll phone home faster than some chop-shop can isolate and inactivate them. Someday the glass chips they leave behind will tell a story. Someday technology will be smarter.

Till then I wait for a faceless insurance company to put a price tag on a father’s love and a phenomenal five year driving experience.

Priceless.

— Clif @ 11:38 am

Seek Simplicity

What is it about moving that’s so hard? 2 weeks to pack, 12 hours to move, then 2 more weeks to figure out what box you put your life in. The older you get the more stuff you collect. Plus it weighs more. How ironic that in a world where global networks daily tear away at the walls of time and place in our work that we still so held back by time and place in our lives?

My new roommie’s got a computer, a TV, a VCR, and a sleeping bag. Roomie says, “My M.O. is that everything I need should fit in the trunk of my car” Sure, no complaints about the new HDTV, stereo or futon in the apartment, but still… how great is that? He packs and moves like geese - anywhere, anytime. I shoot cross-state 3x/week with laptop, Nano, and cell. Production. Education. Communication. What else do you need, really?

Lao-tzu once said, “Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness, have few desires.”

Perhaps it’s time to eBay some complexity.

— Clif @ 11:42 am