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It's all sackcloth and ashes on the Intertunnel these days. Everyone’s touting their Top 10 Ways To Save Next To Nothing By Forswearing Things You Don't Like Much Anyway. Most sound like cheeky Catholic kids offering to give up broccoli for Lent. The Rick Steves du jour -- whoever that is, for all I know it's still Rick Steves -- is explaining that you can afford to visit Paris as long as you wash your socks in your hostel's communal bathroom sink. You know, the black socks you wear with your sandals. Groupon is going to be bigger than Google and General Motors combined any day now.
Here in our ramshackle house in the middle of nowhere, Maine, we never have to worry about scrimping and saving like normal people do, because we don't have any money. We don't clip coupons, because coupons are for buying Regular People Things. All our stuff already comes in white packaging with only nouns on it. If you're saving ten cents on a package that has adjectives or adverbs, or --egad! -- a brand name on it, you're out of our league.
But life is not meant to be lived on a bread and water basis. I bet even Renfield would set aside some of the best bugs so he could have a big, blowout feast once in a blue moon. A person needs luxuries here and there to keep from going loco. We're no different than anybody else in that regard.
"No thanks, I'll pass," has held us in good stead
for most popular things.
Wait a minute; yes we are. We are very different from most people. The "luxuries" that most people enjoy look like an ordeal to us. It's very expensive to dress as badly as a fashionista. Vacations look like a Bataan Death March with a bad buffet added-- a march that begins right after a TSA reenactment of the clearing of the Warsaw ghetto spliced onto a prostate exam.
"No thanks, I'll pass," has held us in good stead for most popular things. We're not going to eat dog food every day so we can splurge and eat bait and call it sushi in a restaurant once a week.
It's not that we wouldn't know what to do if we got our hands on some money. Aesop's fable of the sour grapes doesn't apply to us. We didn't turn off the cable because we're cheapskates; if it were free we wouldn't look at it. Picture your tombstone. Would "That guy sure could watch TV" make you happy as an epitaph?
Once you're accustomed to life outside The Blob, you get a different perspective. You start actually doing all the things you lied about in personal ads to make yourself seem like a decent, interesting person. Admit it; you take long walks in the mall, not along the beach. Why not take a long walk on the wild side with the Maine Family Robinson?
Here's 10 Luxuries we can't do without:
1. A Fire in the Fireplace -If your "fireplace" has a light switch on the side, you're doing it wrong. You need a big, open, masonry hole in the center of your house, into which you place hardwood logs and set them on fire. It's as gratifying a ceremony as anything that has to do with tea and Japan. An ornamental fireplace is the only reason to have a house, really. Warning: a real fireplace has a tendency to produce children.
2. Beautiful Music - The method of introducing noises into your head is just as important as what you're listening to. The average person is injecting godawful noise into their head through waxy earbuds, and paying Steve Jobs a buck a whack for the privilege. This frees up their hands so they can say hello over and over to their friends by typing with their thumbs while they’re bumping into you.
Bad pop music is worthless, but expensive, and you really don't have to go out of your way to hear it --you have to go out of your way to avoid it, usually. Really good music is dirt cheap or free; you just have to look around a little. You can buy a metric ton of Mozart for a pittance and listen to it ambiently in pleasant surroundings. I know I do, and you can get it for free from the library if you want. Or you can pay through the nose to have Katy Perry mp3s rammed in your ear.
3. Good Food - My wife cooks real food from -- hold on to your spatulas -- wholesome ingredients! Amazingly, we all sit down together and eat it. This happens every night. Somehow, what I just described is as foreign to Americans as news from Burkina Faso. I'm not sure where I get all my radical ideas, but I suggest you try them anyway. And put Puccini on in the background, not the TV.
4. No Plastic Anything on the Dinner Table - Why do people voluntarily eat out of a dog dish, drink out of an adult sized sippie cup, then wipe their mouths with toilet paper? Beats me. Glass glasses and china dishes and cloth napkins and fabric placemats are the only way to live. It's cheaper than anything disposable, too. People waiting to be rescued eat and drink directly out of food containers, not gentlemen and ladies.
5. First-Class Booze - I have a hell of a time in other people's houses. They drink diet beer. If they're rich, they drink expensive diet beer. You can get Guinness in a can, with a nitrogen depth charge inside to make it pour like the best pub on earth, in a Walmart in Treestump, Maine; but everyone walks past it to get a thirty pack of Bud Dry Draft Lite Ice. I'd rather have one Guinness a week than ten diet Buds. Actually, I'm dividing by zero here; I don't want any diet Buds. Life is too short to drink diet beer.
6. Hardcover Books - We go to the library to get books, and we buy them at flea markets. I stare at a computer plenty. I don't want to read books on one, or a little crummy handheld one, either. I want to feel the nubbly cloth, and flip the pages. If you're determined to read everything on the New York Times bestseller list, hardcovers do get expensive. I'm determined not to read the New York Times for any reason, never mind book suggestions, so my hardcover habit is cheap. Hardcover Twain for 3 bucks or Dan Brown on Kindle for 23 bucks is not a hard choice.
7. Enough Sleep -- We have an alarm clock. It's around here somewhere. It might still be in a cardboard box from last March. I work almost all the time I'm awake, and my wife does, too. But we don't need two sinks in the bathroom to allow us to leave for cubicleville on identical schedules. Our kids aren't rousted like vagrants and put on buses before the sunrise because it suits the public school teachers.
We go to bed when we're tired, and we sleep until the sunlight wakes us up. Our kids sleep until they're not tired anymore, then their mother starts school. Ambien for dinner and Paxil for breakfast makes you an extra in a zombie movie.
8. A Really Hot Shower - Even if you didn't fall for Obama's sucker bet on a coupon for 10% off a four thousand dollar unlimited tepid water heater, I'll bet you can't take a proper shower.
The building inspector made your plumber set your water heater to max out at 112 degrees, so no one could conceivably get scalded in your house. Now your dishwasher can't get your dishes clean because the water's too cold. Your single-lever fixture in the tub automatically mixes in still more cold water with your tepid water, so you're getting a lukewarm, low-flow fogging instead of a proper, parboiling deluge.
Do your own plumbing. Get the cheapest, biggest electric water heater you can, set it on high, plumb it to a hot and a cold knob, put a big shower head with a lot of big holes in it, and let it rip. I manage not to put my tongue in the toaster oven, and I avoid drinking paint, so the terrors of hot water being available inside my home are lost on me. I have a big, open fire right in the middle of the house -- remember number 1?
9. An Ice-Cold Coke - I drink water when I'm thirsty. When I want a treat, maybe once every six months, I purchase one can of Coca Cola, and pour it over a lot of ice in a big, real glass, glass. It tastes spectacular, like a can of Fourth of July. That’s because it's candy.
You see, almost everything the average person drinks is not really a beverage; it's candy. I get a blank look at Starbucks because I order coffee. All they serve is candy. You drink candy instead of beverages, and then because you're vain (you don't care about your health, it's all vanity) you start drinking diet candy.
Sometimes you get flat, salty sugar-water candy because Peyton Manning told you to, and tell everyone you're an ath-a-lete, not a gigantic infant, but I'm sorry, it's all candy. I went into a Tim Horton's this winter, and asked for milk, but all they have is diet milk, and diet chocolate milk. In a donut shop. Candy is a real treat if you don’t have it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
10. A Walk With Your Honey - My wife and I go out for a walk together almost every day. There are sidewalks, but in my town you can walk in the street and no one runs you down. You can wave to all your neighbors and say hello if you like.
In the summer, when you're done, you can sit on your porch and drink lemonade and everyone you waved at will eventually walk by and wave at you. Or you can move to the city and join a gym and watch a guy with hepatitis peeing in the drain in the gang shower.
Your move.
