I Wrote Some Stuff And Now I Have A Shop-Vac
How Can This Be?
I wrote some stuff and put it online. That’s cool. Then this guy sent me an email and said he wanted to put one of my little essays in a book or something. He said he would give me some money. That was a surprise, but I couldn’t see any harm in it, so I said, “Sure, man. Whatever.” A few weeks later, a check for two-hundred bucks came in the mail.
I'd like to think there were a lot more of these guys out there who will pay you money to write things, but I think they're pretty rare.
I didn’t cash the check for a long time because I couldn’t bear to put the writing money into our regular account where it would lose its distinctive nature and just be swallowed up by all the other money that comes in and goes out so quickly.
I liked having the check there by the computer. It was like “potential money.” Sometimes I would look at the check and think, "Someday I'm going to spend that."
Then one day I cashed the check and bought a “shop-vac,” as they are commonly called.
This is the "shop-vac" I bought
I like the simplicity of a shop-vac. It’s what vacuum cleaners should have been from the very beginning. A powerful motor sucks things through a hose and deposits them into a canister. There aren’t a lot of gadgets to make it complicated. No bags, no belts, no whirling brushes getting clogged with carpet strands. Just a motor sucking stuff into a big can. Beautiful.
A shop-vac can suck up anything too. Sandwiches, crayons, socks, toys, marbles. Whatever you need. The instructions say that my new shop-vac can suck up five pounds of nails in under a minute.
That’s what I’m talkin about.
The shop-vac cost me $69. For an additional $30, I bought a bunch of attachments that allow me to suck things out of corners and from under washers and other hard-to-reach places. There’s even a handle for the hose so you can push it around like a vacuum cleaner and a wide attachment with a brush that looks like it would work pretty well on carpet.
I brought the shop-vac home and tested it in our “family room,” where the TV and couch are. I loved the way it handled the Happy Meal toys and Beenie Babies that are always lying around on the floor. “Thup, thup, thup.” Problem solved. See what I mean? Simplicity. Life seems more simple now that I have a shop-vac.
When I think about how our crappy, $140 vacuum cleaner got clogged on a few Christmas tree needles last December and broke, I wonder why we don’t use shop-vacs inside our homes. Sure they’re a little bulky and don’t look all that nice, but they do the job. For a hundred bucks you can get a sturdy piece of machinery that can suck up anything you want.
So I’m going to use the shop-vac to clean my house for the next couple of weeks as a kind of experiment. I must be missing something. Surely I’ll discover the reason why we buy overpriced, weak little vacuum cleaners that clog easily and have rubber belts and yucky bags and all sorts of parts that can and do break.
If you’re interested in the results of this experiment, send me an email. I probably won’t write about it. I think bloggers should be allowed only one shop-vac essay each. Any more would be pushing it.
So okay, I have a shop-vac. Terrific. But there’s something else nagging at me.
You see, the shop-vac is a real thing. It’s a solid piece of equipment that you can touch with your hands. It takes up space in my workshop. It actually does work in this world. Did I mention that it can pick up five pounds of nails?
Writing, on the other hand, seems somehow less real than a shop-vac. The shop-vac had to be assembled at a factory by people who worked all day long. They worked hard, and they produced something that is a real thing in this world. At the end of the day, the shop-vac people can see hundreds of shop-vacs sitting there and know that they have done a good days work.
When I write, I just sit at my computer giggling to myself, drinking diet cokes, and tapping my fingers on a little keyboard. I don’t make anything that exists in any physical kind of way. Writing is just making little marks on paper that represent various noises the human mouth can make. And my writing doesn't even exist on paper. It just floats around on the Internet, and I don't even know what that means.
Writing is nice and all, but it’s no shop-vac, if you know what I mean.
If you think about it, I wrote some words and traded them for a shop-vac. Is this allowed? Did the guy who pays $200 for an essay and I do something wrong or immoral? Would we want to live in a world where that kind of behavior is commonplace?
How can writing be compared to something real, like a shop-vac?
Other than the fact that they both suck at times. Bada-Boom, Thank you. I’ll be here till Thursday!
Seriously. Something seems wrong here, but I can’t figure out what it is. In the meantime, I'm going to use my new shop-vac and hope that no official representative of some agency of fairness shows up to rip the remaining hundred bucks from my hand and say, "Shame on you."
rlp
9:07:12 AM 
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