I thought at first to give this post the title “Bad capitalist.” Because I wonder whether that is what I am. One principle of capitalism, it seems, is that you produce and consume. That is to say, you are specialized in some skill or another, and you get paid well for this very particular skill, and everything else you can get provided for you, as long as you pay someone, or a company, for the good or service that you seek.
I guess I wasn’t really raised that way. My mother and stepfather in the 1970s decided to buy a big farm in Quebec and decreed that we would practice “subsistance agriculture.” I.e., we would look after ourselves: grow all our own food and even heat ourselves through our labour, by cutting down trees on the farm to split, dry, cord and eventually bring in the basement to put in the furnace over the winter, to stay warm.
My father, meanwhile, was even more extreme; when I spent time with him as a kid, it seems we were always pulling over, to load discarded construction materials into whatever beat-up car he was driving.
One could also argue, and many would, that rather than “bad capitalist,” a better moniker to describe me is “cheap bastard.”
Last night I walked our black lab, Rook, on Rusholme Road, which is a nice street in our neighbourhood where the houses are a lot bigger than ours. In this crazy, snowy winter we are having, snowbanks lined the sidewalk. There it loomed in the darkness: a desk, its legs spiked into a big mound of snow between the sidewalk and the front lawn of a house. We need a desk in the basement, because we rent a room and bathroom downstairs to students; the room is empty right now, and we have been fixing it up, and we put a desk in there, but it’s pretty small for anyone who wants to do serious schoolwork.
I walked the dog home and fetched the car, and went back and stuffed the desk in the back. It was a bit too big to fit, but I got it home. This morning I discovered I’d have to dismantle the desk to get it down the stairs. In its wisdom, Ikea puts a sticker on its furniture with its name; this desk is called Arkelstorp. I looked it up on the Ikea website and it said, “discontinued.” Even so, looking online, I soon found the 52 page instruction booklet for the desk.
So it was a job of a couple of hours to dismantle the desk, carry it down the narrow stairs, and put it back together. I feel good: I kept the desk out of landfill, I saved at least $200, and I got a sense of satisfaction at my own ingenuity.