On The Small Annoyances In Life
I just ordered a canister for my coffee from Amazon. This one. For years I've been using a Gevalia canister I got from them as a promotion to sign up for their 'coffee of the month' club. It's done yeoman duty for those years yet today as I'm flipping it open, the bail that holds the lid down comes off. Right into the pan of sausages as it turns out but I cook those low and slow so it wasn't like I deep fried the thing. The fault, as I examined it, lay in the pin that holds the bail to the ring around the body of the canister. It looks like a long rivet that has lost the flange on one end.
I put it back together but it's now compromised and fatally flawed. Add in that the square base of the canister has never bee my favorite design (coffee gets trapped in the corners) and it became time to acquire a new one. Since I'm all about the stainless steel in the kitchen (wantwantwant a nice stainless fridge but not about to drop the ready on that when the current model is functioning perfectly), I figured that one from Amazon seemed a reasonable bet. From the customer comments I can see that I'll probably have to tack the gasket down and hope the thing holds enough which, since I usually get 8 oz bags from Boca Java, it probably will.
So why the post title? Well, something like buying a new canister is so monumentally inconsequential that my spending the maybe five minutes it took to buy it seemed, afterward, like a waste of time. Compound that with the fact that I didn't really need to buy it, I could have soldiered on with the old one or even kludged a fix, and I'm left wondering about all the staggering inconsequentialities that mount up to form the bulk of days. It's a metaphor for the human condition is my conclusion. It's disgusting to have to go to the bathroom but think what would happen if you didn't. Your life is made better by a process of elimination.
Sometimes a sawbuck for a kitchen gewgaw is a crack in the sidewalk that trips you as you pass. But that stumble may give you a moment to reflect and give you a grip on your basic human condition. It's a mitzvah if you make it so.