Don't lend me stuff. I know this is not a topic of general interest, but what with people being so nice all the time, and wanting to be helpful and stuff, it seems worth mentioning that trying to be helpful to me in the form of lending me stuff is almost always a bad idea.

I love borrowing, but I hate giving back. When you lend me, say, a book, it comes full of secondary meanings for me from when you read it, what you thought of it, and how it shaped your thinking about everything else for the period when you were reading it. Having your book is like having a little snippet of your life right there in my hands. I really like that every object has historic value as well as its real functional value.

Many of my very favorite things belong to other people. The bike rack on my car is a perma-borrow, and every time I use it, I think of the summer that J~ and me and her spent in a great three-way friendship before drifting apart at the end of the year. But I've still got her bike rack that I use all the time, a relic of our summer together.

My driver, the only driver I've ever been able to hit with, is a perma-borrow from another girl, J~. Even though we weren't even that huge of friends, and I haven't heard from her since she got married and ran off somewhere, I am still insanely fond of that driver.

C~ sent me a couple of books before things fell apart, which I read and enjoyed on their own merits, but which I really love because although almost everything else I thought I knew about her wasn't real, at least the books were true. She did know them, she had read them, and she sent them to me. Little rays of sun showing through clouds of obfuscation.

Your stuff that I might borrow is precious because it came from you. It's better than gifts, because while gifts are thoughtful, they're typically new. In their sterile packaging, they come to you clean and without history. But lent items, they have spent time in your company, getting to know you and your ways. They're special in the mode of handmade gifts.

It's not as if I won't give you your stuff back. Just that I come to the table with a tendency to forget that you lent it to me. I never get around to putting the returning of lent items in my little mental tickler file of things I need to remember to do today. And so it typically remains forgotten. If you remember and remind me, I am definitely happy to return your possessions. I'm not pretending it's my stuff. I just really, really treasure your stuff.

But yeah, most people don't expect that they'll have to turn the case over to a collector and possible a guy named "Knuckles" in order to get their stuff back from me.

My bad borrowing habits are a major failure of politeness and thoughtfulness, and I apologize. I've become good at warning people not to lend me stuff, but that's no excuse, really. It's like a kleptomaniac saying, "yes, I'd love to come over for brunch on Sunday, but just so you know, I'm going to steal your stuff. If you pat me down when I leave, you're welcome to get your stuff back, but otherwise I'm going to keep it. Oh, and yeah, you may need to do a strip search. But anything you can find that's yours, you're welcome to keep! Thanks, see you at 10!"

Humerously, I do treat other people the way that I would want to be treated. When I lend you something, I don't expect to get it back. If I think I do need it, I'll say that up front and I'll be willing to harass you for it until you return it.

That is the core problem with the Golden Rule. It assumes we all want to be treated the same. Who can fault me for living by the Golden Rule? But if my GR allows that I wouldn't mind if you stole my car, then I'm allowed to steal your car without guilt or reprisal, sayeth the GR. Same exact thing for borrowing, for me. I expect when I give you something that it's not coming back, so should I be allowed to perma-borrow, even though most people, living by their GRs would not allow for perma-borrowing?

Should the Golden Rule be modified? Should it read, "treat other people as you know that they would like to be treated"? But then you're getting into all sorts of inferences that you know are going to get you in trouble in very short order. "You can't get mad at me, I thought that's what you'd want! I was just following the Revised Golden Rule!" Ugh. That way madness lies.

It comes down to morality not condensing easily into glib statements, I suppose. But wouldn't a little simplicity be nice for a change?

Anyway, you've been warned. Can I borrow a fiver?