I keep a jar of brown rice on a shelf in the kitchen. I never take it down. I never use brown rice. I despise it for its nutty, buttery unctuousness, almost capable of eminence alongside nonentities like marrow or squash but upstaged by any more estimable morsel. Nevertheless, mine is an extremely useful jar of brown rice. One of my most treasured provisions. Because it stops me buying more brown rice.
If it wasn’t there I’d have to go out and buy a packet of brown rice so that I had brown rice on-hand. Because everyone but a vulgarian has brown rice in the house. Thus, my untouched jar of brown rice has saved me buying countless bags of brown rice over the years. It is what I call “a blocker”.
I have a pair of navy blue Havaianas that loiter on my verandah. There’s something so nostalgically attractive about a pair of thongs – ’70s summers, brown rivers, blue heaven milkshakes, the danger of crossing sun-syruped asphalt and wading through patches of devils’ heads, the reminiscent click-clack of childhood meanderings, the thwack of rubber on a sister’s calf.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
Believing they occasionally want to be taken for a walk, I slide into them and get as far as the gate before remembering how uncomfortable and unruly they are – and how the toe-wedgy, simultaneously attacking both feet, is twice as bad as its more infamous intergluteal cousin. Thongs are a podiatric idiocy. I kick them off and slide into the Birkys.
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But, again, they are a most valuable footwear, because they remind me how much I hate to wear thongs. If I didn’t have the blue Havaianas, I’d forget this and buy a new pair immediately. And I’d do it again and again ad-almost-infinitum. They are another blocker.
After trying on the thongs recently, I looked around the house and saw it had become a menagerie of blockers. There sits a box of Corn Flakes. I will never eat them, but would replace them at once if they were not there. There lies a bundle of incense patiently awaiting an aromatic combustion that will never occur. There is an Indian cookbook I will neither open nor do without. If it were gone, I would buy another.
The house is full of these things. In the hall hangs a pea-coat the same as one James Dean was photographed wearing. My hand has reached for it on a thousand inclement days before plucking another, lighter coat from the rack. It is worthless to me, heavy, stiff … and far too suave. Totally desirable – and completely worthless. But if I were to take that coat to the op-shop so another slovenly eyesore might attempt James Deanery, I know I’d buy a replacement within a year. I’d blame the last coat, not my un-suave self. And the new coat would hang unloved until it, too, took its ride to charity and freed another lame James to fail at feigned fame.
My house, and life, is cluttered with blockers of this sort – useless objects whose chucking out would leave an absence that required filling. Looking around, I realise half of all I own is blockers, and that I’ve reached a type of unspoken detente with this disparate array of never-used, despised, and neglected possessions that lie all around me. Subconsciously I know they’re there as a defence against making the same mistake twice, thrice, etcetera.
And it’s not just objects. Corn Flakes, cricket bats … we surround ourselves with all sorts of psychological and social blockers to remain anchored in a sustaining day-to-day equanimity. Half my drinking buddies, for instance, are there to prevent me meeting equally stupid men. How about yours? Run the cast through your mind.
I’ve come to appreciate blockers, and become fond of them anew, as a bulwark against repeating the missteps of the past. The other day I came home and, seeing my thongs on the verandah, my pea-coat hanging in the hall, and that jar of brown rice, I smiled at them serenely, knowing the service they were providing and thankful that they were hanging there, lying there, sitting there, useless except as a caution preventing me from replacing them with something as identically worthless as themselves. I was relaxing on the sofa an hour later when my wife came home and smiled at me in a similarly serene manner as I’d smiled at the brown rice.
