There it is, damn it.
Based on my recent and careful study of the social media zeitgeist, I have come to understand that public confession is the best and most efficacious way to combat private demons. Yet I am ill-equipped to do so there, as my personal engagement with social media tends to be pretty half-assed; I am a dabbler rather than a deep diver. So I have to find some other forum for the baring of my soul (plus, they pay me here).
For today, my soul is preoccupied by a problem that might at first glance not seem too closely tied to demonic possession. It’s not like I am addicted to online pornography, or doxxing, or trolling, or any of the other modern array of activities that really can be immediately harmful to other people.
So here goes: I am into self-harm.
Namely, the jigsaw puzzle.
Or, as I might put it, the damn jigsaw puzzle. Damn, because that is so often what I find myself saying when one of these insidious works of craft is laid out in the house, therefore rendering a perfectly utilitarian table useless for other tasks until its appetite is satisfied.
Or my appetite, more accurately, which is exactly why an otherwise pathetic-seeming heap of flimsy cardboard bits can take the leap from being an annoyance to a demonic presence.
As I am a child of the Midwest, with its long bland weeks of gray skies and sometimes Arctic temperatures, assembling puzzles has long been almost entirely a task for the winter months, when for me the promise of outdoor activities tended to shrivel in January and February. Flagstaff, thank goodness, is a much healthier environment for me, as the wintertime sunshine and diverse topography allow me to continue to engage in genuinely productive leisure time activities more aligned with our 24/7, gotta-get-it-done society, such as hiking up a mountain so that I can then turn around and hike back down again.
Not so suburban Chicago, where as kids my sisters and I took up the habit of filling long empty afternoons by rifling through a mound of puzzle pieces in hopes of finding one that would fit into a receptive corner of an in-progress image. I don’t remember much about the puzzles we completed in those days, except for one that had clearly been given to our family by a sadist, as it reproduced a Mondrian painting whose content consisted entirely of a black-andwhite grid interrupted only by small rectangles in exactly three primary colors. I was scarred. In the intervening years I have tried to cultivate a high degree of respect and receptivity for art on the frontiers, but rigid geometric patterns with the most basic of color tones? No thanks—I’ve got my own sets of Legos to play with here at home.
Unfortunately, my sisters and I, eagerly enabled by other relatives, have fallen into a pattern all too familiar to many, namely reproducing childhood traumas in our adult years. We are all vulnerable because the primary gift-giving season coincides with the shortest days, the longest dull evenings, the grimmest weather. Some—I will not name names here—appear to take a gleeful pleasure in choosing huge gift puzzles based on similar sorts of nightmare qualities, like vast expanses of glistening snowfields or hallucinogenic collages of butterflies, all of the same species, that individually are quite beautiful but when massed into a 2D jumble gather themselves into a threatening mass reminiscent of a Hitchcock flick. When one of those is laid out on the dining room table, I am drawn to it like a moth to a candle . . . and there I have kind of stretched the metaphor to the breaking point, and anyway the moth doesn’t know it’s about to get burned, and I already do.
But those are the extremes. Even the simpler puzzles we often have in play are a problem, simply because in a sure-I-can-work-from-home era they constitute a perennial distraction, a balm to the procrastinator. Face it, procrastination is a mixed blessing. The column may be late, but at least in putting it off I have done a lavishly complete job of washing the dishes or organizing, alphabetically, the canned goods in the pantry. The urgent task may be neglected, but at least there is genuine benefit in completing a non-pressing one.
When the distraction is a jigsaw puzzle, though, I already know ahead of time that ultimately the only benefit of finding the piece showing the summit of Mt. Fuji, as I just did in the middle of composing this very sentence, is that this modest achievement draws us all closer to the time when we can tear the completed puzzle apart and relegate it once again to the darkness of the box in which it belongs.
I wish that were the end of it. I wish I had the strength of will to simply consign the boxes to the innards of a living room cabinet and forget about them, or to take the whole lot to Bookman’s and exchange them for something genuinely useful, like Mexican lattes in the café. But the likelier scenario is that Bookman’s will seduce me with its entire wall of used puzzles I’ve never seen before. And even the ones that remain at home, packed in their boxes, retain their potency through the warmer months, waiting for the next opportunity to distract me from. . . what was I saying?
