Ordering Ideas from Amazon.com

There are times when you feel you have been given things, gifts of entire subjects or, perhaps, questions to ask the Universe with the almost certain possibility of satisfying answers.  You do not always know who the donor is or why you were singled out for the gift you were given.  But you take it.  And you write about it.  Somewhere.  Perhaps even here, where you have indeed written about such gifts since March of 2007.

You have these attitudes because there are times when there are no gifts; you then have to make your own things or wait out the time for gifts to arrive, as though these things had somewhere else to go before stopping off where you sit, waiting.

Thanks to the addition to your life of a cell phone with a built-in Wi-Fi Mobile hot spot and a laptop MacBook, you have had the opportunity to waiting out the arrival of gifts in places remote from your home base.  This allows you a way out in the form of being able to write about where you happen to be, which is not in any way cheating although it seems so obvious that it begins to feel like cheating.

Wanting to write and liking to write are of themselves gifts, but they are nothing without having something to write about.  For the longest time, you were concerned that being too opinionated would give you unhealthy things to write about, causing your output to be tainted with the sound of screed, the sclerosis of agenda, and the potential for propagandizing what you hoped would emerge as story.  This approach left you nowhere to go, particularly since you'd been reading things that sounded to you as though they were laden with screed, agenda, or emotive gloss.

From time to time, the gifts began arriving, as though you'd ordered them yourself from Amazon, then forgotten about them.  You would not--to extend the metaphor--order a boring book from Amazon, nor, once you began to think of it, would you order anything boring from Amazon.  Checking through a recent list of things you ordered from Amazon--mostly books and CDs--the most bland, if not boring thing you ordered was a two-quart stainless steel sauce pan, which you have to admit does not sound exciting.  When you removed it from its shipping box, you were taken with the grace and beauty of it.  Such a thing would never qualify as boring.

Although you are a bit miffed with Amazon right now over their attitude about California sales tax, you are not about to let the opportunity for a good metaphor get away from you.  When you are waiting for the gift of an idea or association, you are going to imagine ordering one from Amazon, even to the point of describing what function you'd like the idea or notion or even a good, quality comparison to accomplish.  You are even going to imagine customer reviews.  I have been using Amazon ideas for years, someone from New Jersey will write, and they are always useful and competitively priced.  You may even like Amazon ideas enough to write a review yourself.