bob the blob

A number of years ago, my wife asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I told her to buy me anything and tell me it was hard to find. Since I’m naturally drawn to oddities, obscurities, and pop culture marginalia, she understood that I was the mark of that joke. I like nothing better than a trivial quest driven by elusive values. Let my coat of arms be a shaggy dog chasing its own tale.

I used to send away for free catalogs as a child. I enjoyed the anticipation and reward of receiving something in the mail, something addressed to me. To my eyes, there was no better way to validate a lonely existence than to see one’s own name typed on a mailing label, to request a catalog and know it will be hand-delivered by an adult. In uniform! I receive mail therefore I am. While the catalogs were an exercise in hope and aspiration–I enjoyed poring over them, dreaming about which items I would buy if I had the money–they were also the ends to my means. I could cut them up and make collages, hang pages up on my wall, or simply admire the stack as a tribute to my resourcefulness: look what I amassed for the mere cost of a stamp and envelope.

I see now that this was partly how I came to worship objects.

Mercilessly exposed to media that whets our appetites for Things That Will Make Our Lives Better, we’ve all been conditioned to bow at the altar of materialism. Like unbacked colts, we prick our ears, advance our eyelids, and lift our noses to smell the promise of materialism. Lars Eighner, in his 1992 essay about dumpster diving, called us “the rat race millions who have confounded their selves with the objects they grasp and who nightly scavenge the cable channels looking for they know not what.” Eighner, who lived without a permanent address for years, understood that what we’re looking for is to fill the gaping holes in our souls, foolishly throwing deliberated purchases and impulse buys alike into the very void that consumer culture itself created. When necessary action feels impossible, buying stuff provides the surrogate scratch for our spiritual itchiness. It feels like action, like we’ve nourished ourselves, but to be alive in our post-industrial world is to be systematically hollowed out and filled with plastic, sawdust, and cheap electronics.

The first two Noble Truths of Buddhism tell us that suffering is inevitable and that desire is the cause of this suffering. This idea has been helpful to me because I can accept the hunger pains of desire as evidence of the fact that I am alive, which, even with all the suffering and Amazon delivery trucks clogging up the streets, is a fairly good thing to be. I just wish I didn’t sometimes feel so deeply imprisoned by desire, or maybe that I wasn’t so regularly invited into its cell via sniper-level targeted ads as if it were a totally normal thing.

I spent ten years on a quest for a children’s record that a friend once brought to my house on a lark. In the summer of 1993, there were only two things to do: drive around in Mike’s beat up car, listening to records and CDs recorded onto tape, or go shopping for more records and CDs to record onto tape and listen to in Mike’s beat up car. Mike was tall and mean looking. He played bass, and like a lot of bass players, he said very little. Me, guitar player that I was, I spoke too eagerly and too much. Our motley friendship was largely based on things that didn’t require language or things we didn’t have the language for: music and depression. One day, he came by with a 7-inch children’s record on the Peter Pan label called Pre-School Days: Learn About Shapes. The cover artwork shows a cartoonish illustration of four smiling children (and various animal friends) crowded around a partially-clothed, purple creature we eventually come to know as Bob the Blob. The premise of the record, which features a combination of story and song, is that, on the day that the children are learning about shapes in school, Bob, who is shapeless, comes by and asks the children for help in–you guessed it–finding a shape. Mike was excited to play me the song that Bob sings by way of introduction. It’s a delightfully weird, minor-key, oom-pah number with a haunting bass clarinet counterpoint. Kurt Veil for kids. The voice actor sings in a pitchy, dour tenor that’s more moan than melody. “My arms are like spaghetti,” he warbles, “my legs are bands of rubber.” I’ve always admired the children’s gallantry in the vignette preceding the song. While Bob’s authoritative knock alone would be enough to rattle my aging nerves, the children allow him into their classroom, marveling at his tragic amorphousness. This is why Bob turns to them for help. Only young children possess this level of self-assuredness. Just as Mike anticipated, I loved it. We put it on a tape and added it to our library of songs to listen to in his beat up car, absolutely certain each time it came on that we were the only people in the world listening to Bob the Blob. As two screwed up kids raised in working-poor households set in depressing neighborhoods, we didn’t have money, or confidence, or popularity, or lovers, but we had an exclusive club of two.

As lost souls invariably do, Mike and I eventually went our separate ways, and years later, whenever I was reminded of Mike and our friendship, our hours of shared loneliness spent driving around aimlessly, I would conduct an Internet search for that Bob the Blob record, trolling eBay or looking for a Peter Pan Records discography page. I even once wrote a long, descriptive email to a punk singer because I knew that he collected children’s records. No response. I remained just as lonely and lost as my younger self (and probably always will be), but I was now under the influence of nostalgia. Just as amylase breaks down starch to produce simple sugars, resulting in sweeter a fruit as it ripens, so does time sweeten our sadness. This is an integral process in the commodification of memory.

Consumerism requires a peculiar sense of individualism. We come to believe that we are what we own. Carving out our individuality means finding the products that best reflect our values and identities. The irony, of course, is that most of the items we buy to assert this sense of individuality are mass-produced in factories and made readily available to millions of other people in easily accessible chain stores. In this way, it’s not individuality we’re buying, it’s membership to a tribe. What we’re saying when we put a Punisher sticker on our pickup trucks, or wear a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt, or hang the words Live, Laugh, Love in our living rooms is: I’m one of these types of people. Consumerism is the 8-bit reduction of individualism’s full 24-bit resolution. Your carefully curated home, a museum of store-bought objects, is like filling your plate with items from the all-you-can-eat buffet and somehow feeling like you deserve credit for having created something.

I suspect we have a good deal in common with Bob the Blob. Bob, in his comically pitiful singing voice, pleads with the children: “I’d like to find a shape. Will you find one for me? A shapeless blob I don’t want to be.” It’s worth noting that Bob asks the world to define him, to put him in a box or some other shape-like shape, even when his very name defines him as a shapeless blob. In this reading, it’s not the shape that matters; it’s being accepted by others. Bob wants to belong, wants to be a shape that is recognized. But what will become of Bob once he finds his shape, once his desire is fulfilled? I somehow doubt that will be the cartoon end of his cartoon suffering. Knowing that he is, say, Bob the Dodecahedron will not answer the question, “For what purpose does a dodecahedron exist?”

My quest for the Bob the Blob record is not an isolated incident. I tend to obsess over obscure objects. Old aspirin bottles, books, shoes, clothes, instruments, and, yes, records. Most recently, I obsessed over finding Klaus Nomi’s discography on vinyl. Then as many Red Rhodes steel guitar albums that I could find. And then a copy of ex-Honeybus member Pete Dello’s only album: Into Your Ears. Discogs and Ebay have made shopping for rare vinyl disappointingly easy. I used to have to wait years to accidentally stumble across what I was looking for. Now it’s all a click away, and instead of feeling elated by scratched itches, I simply feel a kind of empty shame. That’s because it was never about the objects; the search–which is a type of suffering–was the part of the process that gave the whole affair an illusion of meaning. In the late ’90s, it took me two years to find a copy of More Today Than Yesterday, the sole album by the one-hit-wonder band Spiral Starecase. “More Today Than Yesterday” is just a stupid pop song, but after hearing it on a battery-powered radio one summer morning, I decided that my life was incomplete until I heard the rest of the album. Before the internet, we asked the people we knew, and if they didn’t know, we asked strangers, even if it meant sheepishly singing to them. I just looked it up on Discogs and found 39 copies for sale. I liked it better when it was harder, when the search provided a surrogate sense of purpose. The internet and AI will increasingly exacerbate this problem; the easier everything gets, the harder life becomes. The desire for convenience displaces necessary suffering and is replaced by ennui and existential despair.

What does my penchant for the obscure say about me? Why am I so attracted to the discarded and the outdated? I can never be completely sure, but no matter how I try to make sense of it, it’s all bad news. Either I self-pityingly see myself in the neglected and peculiar dusty junk left curbside–useless and unwanted–or it’s a symptom of ego, a pompous rejection of all the stuff made for the plebeian masses. To simplify it even further: either I’m garbage, or I’m special garbage.

Cassandra Edwards, the heartbreakingly tragic figure in Dorothy Baker’s 1962 novel Cassandra at the Wedding, strives to build an insular world that she shares only with her twin sister Judith. I identify with Cassandra and her quest to live in an exultant nation of two. It’s how I felt with Mike driving around town listening to “Bob the Blob.” “Let’s unlist it,” she says of their phone number, “and be different. Just us. Nobody else ever.” Cassandra is a woman in a patriarchal society. She is intelligent to her own detriment. She has an artist’s soul. She’s been raised by unstable parents. She’s queer. This is to say that her circumstances force her to survive in the margins, and in doing so, she comes to find a home in the margins, the place where she believes she and Judith belong. She tells her analyst, “It’s a question of working ceaselessly at being as different as possible because there must be a gap before it can be bridged. And the bridge is the real project.” I’ve been thinking a lot about that last line. Cassandra, like all wounded people, ultimately wants to belong to the world. Her “bridge” is a desire for connection, but what necessitates the gap? Pain, I think. Leaning into difference is a way to reclaim some sense of power, a way for repatriates to survive in the land from which they have been exiled, a way to express the ache of rejection by doing a little rejecting of your own.

People make fun of hipsters for boasting about a band: I was into them before they were famous. And on one hand, yes, it’s simultaneously a conquistador’s boast (I was there first!) and a condescending jab at someone who’s late to the Cool Party. Strip away the layers, however, and you’ll see that it’s the mark of the wounded and the betrayed. I know because I sometimes feel that unpleasant pang of indignation when some obscure song I love is suddenly featured in a popular television series. It feels like something that was once yours alone has been cruelly ripped away from you. People who feel betrayed by a band’s success are often people who, feeling malnourished by the offerings of mainstream culture, sought enrichment in some faraway corner of the underground, often through long careful hours of search and discovery. It stands to reason that they’ll resent their carefully chosen artifact suddenly claimed by the very mainstream culture that left them alienated and unfulfilled. Again, I speak from experience.

Perhaps the major appeal of the most extreme forms of music–punk, metal, experimental, noise, and so forth–is that there’s no chance of this music ever being popular. But it must be said: the desire to hoard music is selfish and immature; it’s just a different way to worship objects. I sometimes see my record collection as a shameful shrine to how empty and broken I must be. It’s so embarrassing to be human! It’s so embarrassing to be alive!

But then I’m not living the unexamined life. I’m not hoarding money and resources that could be used to reduce the suffering of others. I may feel like an island sometimes, but I also know that an island is just a mountain whose shape is defined by surrounding water. No bridges necessary; I am already connected. I’m neither garbage nor special garbage but a puny human with human-sized desires that sometimes get expressed in stupid human ways. And the most human action of all is to forgive.

That Christmas long ago, my wife did indeed buy me some hard-to-find esoteric stuff, much appreciated and duly added to my museum of shapeless substance and misfit matter. It is in these gestures, when our loved ones are able to trace the outline of our desires and define us with a gift, that we cease to feel so formless.

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