Friday, May 27, 2005

Binding Agent Two: Projections

The introduction of a new stapler into my life a month or so ago has instigated a series of revellations to me which any regular reader of this site would have anticipated, since I typically overthink everything so much my teeth get tired.  That’s okay, me and my uncontrolled cogitations have learned to live together.  But usually, when I do my little essay-writing exercises and exorcise those notions, they stay exorcised.  It’s rare that the process takes me to a place where the notion I’ve fleshed out demands more flesh as little as a month or so later. 

But that’s what’s happened with the stapler.  Who’da thunk.  Not the new stapler, mind you, at my amusingly untidy office desk - not this time, anyway.  This time it’s the other stapler at the other desk.  And this one’s a whole new ball of old wax. 

It was easy, in retrospect, to get rid of the weak stapler at work.  It was nothing to me but an impediment, and dismissing it was an act of self-reclaimation, a rejection of erroneous beliefs about my own competence or lack thereof. 

But the home stapler is a different animal altogether.  It’s a heavy grey swingline in cold dense steel.  It sits heavy on the desk, heavy in my palm.  It drove the staple with a clean firm action, folding the tines flatly against the back of the sheet with inexorable precision.  It was with deep satisfaction that I grafted its pretense of order and structure onto the diffuse confusion of my personal affairs - those that could be stapled, anyway.  It sounded industrial when it punched out a staple - more akin to a rivet hammer than a paper clip.  I got it 15 or 20 years ago, and it was far from new then; even so, its battleship grey paint is unchipped and undulled by years of service.  The only thing that reveals its age to the inquiring eye, is the sticker. 

The sticker is a typical file tab sticker, three inches by 1/2, with a once-orange stripe across the top. Typed - with a typewriter - on it is the phrase: “PROJECT SAVE”.  When I first found this particular stapler, it was in a box of office equipment to be discarded by whereever I was working at the time - a bank’s corporate offices, I think, or maybe a studio in LA.  It was a place, anyway, that went through a lot of deskly accoutrements, and they were ready to scrap another box of such stuff with this stapler thrown in too.  “Project Save?,” I asked whoever was in charge of the process as I pulled the old workhorse from the bin of refuse.  “Wuzzat?” “Oh I dunno,” was the apathetic response, “I think it was something to do with recycling old equipment from a school or something.” “Can I take it, then?” “Whatevah...”

So the Project Save stapler came home with me, and it served me well for years and years.  Every time I used it, it felt reliable and solid.  It bit hard and held fast, a solid fistful of office efficiency with a gratifyingly trustworthy clamping action - and every time I had occasion to pick it up or punch it down, I read that label again.  PROJECT SAVE.  How long ago had it been acquired, and by whom, originally?  Where had it done its service?  What hands had wrapped around it, what documents had it bound?  How many offices had it occupied in its mysterious career?  Where the hell did I even find it in the first place, anyway? 

The questions melded, over time, into a worn wrapper that contained this understated tool, till I no longer thought of them as individual questions but rather as a bundle of myseries that were, as a group, comfortingly familiar in their inpenetrability. 

The stapler never seemed to age or change - except for that PROJECT SAVE sticker, which grow more soiled and harder to read as the years passed.  It was stuck on securely, but was as the portrait was to Dorian Grey, revealing to the attuned eye the inevitable viscissitudes of time. 

Lately, that label has become pretty much totally obscured by grime.  I kow what it says, but that’s because it’s grown into my psyche, not because I can actually read it.  And then again, something else seems to have changed lately, too.  I pick up my reliable old stapler and try to use it, but no staple emerges.  I check; it’s not empty, so I try again on a dry run - staple.  Re-insert the paper: no staple.  I fiddle with it till I can conclude that it’s only working every second time it’s cleared.  It’s falling apart, evidently, or already fallen.  Project Save has taken it quite a long way from its unknowable origins, but now, reluctantly, it may be time for me to initiate Project Discard.  There’s freedom to be had, and clarity, and progress.  I just know I’m gonna miss the old guy.  Makes me wonder a little exactly what’s been saved, and by whom.