The Monkey Lamp – Just a Sec, Fire, Before I Walk with You

A work mate told me he had bought a new lamp.

It was the kind one could place, say, on the side table, in the shape of a monkey, holding a luminous orb on his shoulder. My first reaction, before I realized it was totally pointless to even utter this in his presence, was to exclaim what fun! Now he had a monkey lamp, just like in Lorelai and Rory’s house!

He isn’t a GG man, so he is totally oblivious to the numerous contemptuous references Emily makes during the course of the show to “that dreadful monkey lamp”, the one standing on the Gilmore girls’ side table in the living room. Okay, Lorelai’s monkey lamp is a piece of camp thrash, like the dancing rabbi, and probably bought on a whim for a few bucks because it was funny. My work mate’s new lamp, on the other hand, is a designer lamp, bought from a nice store, and cost a bundle. And because it was the last one they had, Norton was feeling special and kismet about his lamp.

And it’s a gorgeous lamp, and funny, too, believe me. He even named it, in the truest Lorelai fashion, and while I was rambling on about the monkey lamp in my show to his slightly bewildered expression and Nearing Impatient But Still Able To Hold It On -smile, I wondered to myself for the umpteenth time why he didn’t watch the show that has become sort of a life style for me, a life style I have always practiced, yes, only now with surround sound, the people on TV talking and watching movies and eating their lives away just like me, the pacing and humor such that I take my blood pressure according to it at nights after work.

Perhaps he thought it was too girly – arguably true, I mean it is Gilmore Girls; too whimsical and all over the place – never, he is also a whimsical person, so that can’t be it; too pastel – he likes red and bright colors, at least on him; or maybe he thought it pointless to start watching something that aired almost twenty years ago, a point my man used to make a lot, back when he had no idea how much trouble he was going to get into from saying that to my face while I was watching it.

After concluding my sorrowful cycle of inquiry in my head about his continuous putting off starting to watch my show - that resembled remarkably his continuous putting off starting to read my blog by the way ;D - I started thinking about how he had told me the lamp was now his most prized possession, and how it was standing on the figurative mantelpiece in his house. I got that, did I ever.

We all have those most important of the important things we own, and they can be surprising things.

I have one friend, who is the contrary example to everything I have written here so far, and seeing him after a long time was like having Marie Kondo and all her friends over at the restaurant. Nigel’s minimalism in life can be almost described as all-out asceticism, I feature about him and a point in life I have never fully understood, and as we were comparing notes about the past several months, I secretly wondered about him.

I have written at length before about how I, too, enjoy the simple life, and don’t really need a whole bunch of extravagant stuff for my happiness (for instance, Lacy, Lacy Bras, or, a Bus Writer; Give Me All Your Money and I’ll Make Some Origami, Honey; Is Happiness a Warm Gun – What Does Karl Marx Think?). But let’s face it, compared to Norton, who buys the monkey lamp and is high for the rest of the year, and, a more extreme comparison, to Nigel, who has a bed and a table and a chair and a boat, his one luxury, I do come off as the Queen of Clutter.

I’ve got to have my books and my pretty pictures, my expensive bras, my beautiful shoes, my myriad clothes, my records, although significantly less these days after joining a streaming service a year ago, my movies, my bags, my knick-knacks.

If I had to pick out the crème de la crème from my things, like if I had a half an hour to get those things away from the fire, what would be my most prized possessions? Norton, obviously, would go for the monkey lamp. Nigel would probably just jump out the window into the motorboat awaiting underneath and MacGyver his ass into the sunset.

My man, while not a spendthrift about the same things as me, shares my inability to save a euro to save his life, he is a collector like myself, and between the two of us, the fire scenario would be devastatingly confusing. He’d be hauling out his collection of buck knives and his twenty-kilo hi-fi coffee maker that makes one cup at a time he hasn’t used in two years now and his books on Stanley Kubrick and his cameras and his many, many wind-up wristwatches. And his sourdough starter from the freezer. And probably his goddamn knife-sharpener.

My list would start in the kitchen, too. First of all, my grandparents’ wedding china, or what’s left of it. Old, somewhat chipped, but knowing those plates were what they received as a gift oh so many years ago makes them my most beloved plates, my Sunday plates if you will, and while I certainly use them a lot, they are on my Most Vulnerable in the House -list, and I never fail to mention their frailty when it’s my man’s turn to wash the dishes.

Second, my wine glasses, bought for four euros at a flea market, so they are not pricey or belonged once to anybody I knew. But they are exactly like the ones Barbra Streisand serves Robert Redford red wine in in The Way We Were. So it means that, you know, I am Barbra and Robert.

Book-wise, I’d be royally fucked, so perhaps it would be better to let it all go instead of trying to choose in a hurry, or at all, between the Stephen King collectibles and the Simone de Beauvoirs and Virginia Woolfs. Of course, Mrs. Dalloway would be the obvious choice here to save, but the copy I have is a cheap, two-euro Wordsworth Edition, and it’s not like it’s out of print, so no. Perhaps the coffee table book I carried home from Paris last year, depicting Marguerite Duras’ life in pictures, a book I have never seen anywhere else. It was a gift from my man, too, so a bit of romance there as well.

Shoes and bags, then? I have a nagging sensation, that, in this department, too, if you can’t save ’em all, don’t save any of them. Not even the exquisite black-and-white Minna Parikkas. Or the Limited Edition black suede Adidas with blazing neon orange stripes. Oh crap. Perhaps if I just started wearing them to bed?

My turntable? My records? Just returning from Pori Jazz, from an Erykah Badu gig, my first reaction would be to save Baduizm and Baduizm Live. But that’s insane. They aren’t exactly handily available for saving, and while I know the ballpark they reside in on the record shelves, the amount of time I'd need to get to them would mean they were all I saved. – Of course, one could argue that after those two albums, who needs anything else?

My vintage bed stand lamp, a brass beauty with a wooden stand that I absolutely adore, and would by no chance have anywhere else in the house except there? (Yes, folks, my version of the monkey lamp.) On second thought, though, with its original electric cord, maybe that’s what started the fire.

The hundreds of hand-written letters from my friends from the Nineties and early 00’s? It’s a nice idea, but what are old letters, in the end, but old letters? And in case of fire in their houses, what would the odds be that they, too, chose to save the letters, so that future scholars would have the whole story in their hands and not just my friends’ letters to me? I guess this is why others make carbon copies.

I guess if I absolutely needed to choose my monkey lamp, the winner would be my journals. Maybe they are worth nothing. But maybe they are worth something. Anaïs Nin buried her numerous journals in a crate underground during WW2, when she had to finally leave Paris for New York, and could only take with her so many things. After the war, she retrieved her collection left behind at the mercy of Nazis, found it intact and in pristine condition, and thus had all the volumes with her until the end. As a journal-keeper, I love that story.

But perhaps that’s cheating. I have already recounted elsewhere on the blog (in Riding with Henry & Anaïs/Mrs. Dalloway, Party of One to be exact) the story about how Miller brought with him overseas a comforter and some plates and glasses from Nin’s house in France, when he traveled to New York to meet up with her. Out of all the things he could have filled his suitcase with, he chose these seemingly irrelevant artifacts that, for him, bore a deep significance.

When the fire alarm went off at my work place a couple of years ago and we had to evacuate our place of business, I shocked both my work colleagues and my superior by running back inside after it was empty, to get my bag from the locker room because it had my journal in it, and had there actually been a fire back then, I might have bitten the dust because I just had to storm back in like Van Damme, saving my precious diary from the flames. My boss still keeps laughing at the story, the alarm, luckily, having been false, and nothing horrible really having gone down, but it’s a nervous laughter.

I want to say, in my defense, that by the time we had had the place evacuated and had secured the security issues at hand, it was starting to be clear there was no real danger there. Had I seen smoke, I of course would have let the fire have the diary and never given it a second thought. I think I reasoned the situation being golden for possible easy money looters, and while my wallet would have been the laughing stock at the robbers’ gathering afterwards, when they were comparing notes on the loot, you know like in A Christmas Carol, the journal would have been a devastating loss for me.

I read once, on IMDb I think, about how Sean Penn has said that having a fire burn down his house turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him, really teaching him a lesson in how all the things we consider priceless in day-to-day life turn out to mean nothing when one is faced to having lost it all.

But let’s not get too deep or profound here. We are discussing, after all, stuff, today.

So, conclusion? The journals are in a cupboard, behind a lock and key. Not very convenient for saving, then, when time is scarce, and the key is in a different part of the house anyway, in a secret place, because like Monica suggested to Phoebe, keeping a copy of the family heirloom cookie recipe at least a hundred feet from the original is always a good idea. Perhaps I would just grab the nearest stack of unread books on my nightstand, throw my emerald green vintage silk dress on top of the pile, run out, barefoot, in my Yummy-Sushi pajamas, and call it a day.

Meanwhile, let’s have those alarms up and working and those fire blankets handy, so we won’t have to start picking and choosing any time soon. I’ve got one fire blanket in the kitchen, myself, and another by the washing machine.

For H.V., my fellow tsundoku and Twin Peaks man