Do you ever see a word and immediately think of another word that kind of looks like it, and you just have to follow it? I saw that today’s prompt was "purpose" and immediately thought "porpoise." Porpoises are similar to dolphins, except they have a shorter beak and different teeth. And the weird thing is, their closest living relative is the hippopotamus. Go figure.

You’ll be happy to know that I’ve dealt with my sudden need to learn everything there is to know about porpoises, which was the purpose of the last paragraph. Let’s move on.

The big question, it seems, is "what is my purpose in life?" What is the meaning of life in general, and specifically what’s the meaning of my life?

The first thing that came to mind was the Baltimore Catechism, which was the fundamental training we received in Christian Doctrine when we were in first and second grade. It has this to say about it…

God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.

And this…

To gain the happiness of heaven we must know, love, and serve God in this world.

All of which sounds wonderful, and they’re certainly things that I strive to do. The question is "How?" It doesn’t really say. Then I remembered my Religion textbook, and these two pictures that stood side by side. One picture showed a man and a woman, he in a tuxedo, she in a wedding gown. Under that picture was the legend "THIS IS GOOD." The second picture showed the same two people (ostensibly), he in a cassock with a Roman collar, she in a nun’s habit, with the legend "THIS IS BETTER." Okay, so the big push that started in Catholic school was to join the priesthood or religious life. I’ve kept up with my classmates from St. Ignatius School, Class of 1970, and as far as I know, no one became a priest or nun. Two guys went to the seminary for high school, and both were home within a couple of years; both are married with families today. We all seem to have opted for good rather than better.

So, I did what any self-respecting adult in the 21st Century would do: I Googled it. (Except I used Duck Duck Go, a search engine that doesn’t track you.) I found this page on the blog of a man named Mark Manson, who calls himself "Author, Thinker, Life Enthusiast." The post is titled "7 Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose." It’s a pretty interesting essay, which you can read on your own. One question on his list was this:

I thought back to 1964, when I was 8, and thought about what I liked to do back then.

• Draw
• Listen to the radio
• Watch TV
• Make noise with the guitar I got from my cousin Tim (who was Teddy at the time). I couldn’t actually play the thing, but a lot of the things I did by pounding on it and slapping the strings are actual techniques that people like Tommy Emmanuel use today. Willy Cusick, my friend, had a ukulele which he played kind of the same way I played the guitar, and the two of us would make noise together. We even wrote dumb songs together, with names like "I want to go crazy over you" and "Green and yellow bubble spider" and "I like to eat." Which reminds me,
• Write dumb songs
• Wander the neighborhood, on foot and on my bicycle
• Etc., etc., etc.

And I realized, the only things that I do now are "listen to the radio" (the 21st Century equivalent, anyway) and "watch TV." I let 8-year-old me down. No wonder the kid’s crying. I feel like crying myself.

I needed that article when I was 8, you know?

Last week, I talked about a recent acquisition for my Lien Chemical Company ephemera collection, and talked about why I’m collecting items from that company (i.e. I was scared to death when I was a kid at the sight of their logo, which was practically ubiquitous at one time, leading to some very uncomfortable moments when we were out). I’m sure many of you found that strange, and you’d probably be right. I had a few irrational fears like that: Besides Lien, there were fire drills, water heaters in the bathroom, Emergency Broadcast System tests, and a few others that I’ve probably blocked out because they were so terrifying.

I think we all are scared of something that seems irrational, and that no amount of explaining can get people to understand. To some, those fears can seem funny. One day I was someplace where The Maury Povich Show was on the TV, and he was having one of his shows where he talks to people who have irrational fears, like being frightened by aluminum foil, balloons, cotton, mustard, and flowers. I know that he means well, because he has a psychologist on the show who offers to help these people confront their fears, and I think he tries to approach the topic with compassion and empathy. It bothers me, though, that there are members of his audience who find this hilarious. I wonder how many people write for tickets and specifically ask for tickets to "one of those shows with the weirdos that are scared of goofy shit." Or how many people record those shows so they can sit at home and laugh their asses off.

All fear is irrational, to a certain extent. Admittedly, some fears are harder to explain than others, like being scared of logos in the bathroom or rubber bands, but they’re very real to the people who are scared by them. It’s part of being human.

By now, you’ve probably figured out that I can be pretty crazy at times. A few years ago, I wrote a post where I owned up to some of the things that scared me as a kid:

One of the ways that I’ve learned to cope with these fears is to find things that remind me of these things that scared me. For example, there are a host of videos on YouTube of Emergency Broadcast System tests, which I now watch pretty freely and are almost a comfort, reminding me of happy times gone by.

I was browsing around on eBay one day and happened to run across this:

It’s a catalog from Lien Chemical Company, whose trademark scared me as a kid. (We’ve never quite been able to figure out how it started; I think I figured out that I was in a restroom one day and a strange man came in and said things that made me feel as though he wanted to molest me, but that’s just conjecture.) I saw this catalog and felt the need to have it. Turns out that the company had quite an impressive range of products and services.

eBay has a feature where you can put certain keywords in and be alerted anytime someone has something you might be interested in. I decided that it might be fun to start collecting ephemera from Lien. So far, my collection consists of the catalog, several uniform patches, copies of a couple of patents they applied for, obituaries from several of their employees, and my most recent purchase, a pocket diary from 1959.

It didn’t look like much in the pictures on eBay, but I figured for ten bucks, shipping included, who’d be without?

I got the thing last week and it’s really kind of a cool little book.

Inside the front cover is an advertisement that features a rather snazzy looking gentleman who might or might not look like your Lien representative and a general list of things you can get from him. On the facing page is a list of the addresses for their main office and branches. Whenever I see an old address, I go out to Google Maps and see what’s there now. In the case of their Chicago location, it’s now a green space.

Flip over to the next page, and there’s a more detailed list of the stuff Lien sold, along with their guarantee, signed by C. B. Lien himself, and a page where you can put all kinds of personal information.

Then it gets interesting: the pages that follow, before you even get to the calendar part, have information about

• the meaning of the names of the months of the year and days of the week
• a list of the legal holidays and other observances and which states observe them
• a list of wedding anniversaries (e.g. the 25th is the silver, 50th is gold, and 45th is the sapphire)
• points of Constitutional law
• the figures from the 1950 census
• table of distances between major US cities
• a list of states, their capitals, the year they were admitted to the Union, and rank in area (Alaska and Hawaii are missing, of course)
• time zone differences
• Roman and Arabic numerals
• etc., etc., etc.

This little book belonged to someone who wrote a number of cryptic notes in the calendar and other pages. I tried to figure out what they meant, and about went nuts.

Anyway, that’s my most recent purchase, and yes, I’m strange…