I open the box of toothpicks and shake a small portion out into my palm.
They are of a shape: pale, virgin white birch cylinders, their tapered ends coming to a point.
The uniformity of the group is boring in its flawlessness; remarkably unremarkable; yet one more aspect of the human urge to simplify, regulate, and conform for simplicity, symmetry, and use; a thin veil of bland perfection and agreement draped over the otherwise chaotic and uncontrollable universe that scares so many of us into a state of rigid and ofttimes violent implacability.
Out of this batch of perfect, little, carbon copies, a sore thumb protrudes. A misprint. A deviant. So regular are its peers that this minor inconsistency in form screams out like a belch in a sentence, a shark in a sandbox, a corpse at a garden party.
One end of this aberrant toothpick is exceedingly thin, as if it became stuck in the part of the machine that rounds the points and rotated there, as in a pencil sharpener, getting whittled down to a finer diameter than any other.
Somehow this frail defect of a toothpick was not only made but also survived the manufacturing and filtering process unbroken, passing through, unnoticed both by automatic and visual inspection, to the packaging stage and, thus, ended up in my home, in my hand.
It is but a curiosity. The correct thing to do would be to snap off the useless end, use the other as normal, and then toss it away as I would any other toothpick but I am fascinated by it, sensing, in some vague way, a kinship with this fragile, unlikely, and seemingly useless thing that fits not into the world as it was meant to, as its peers do.
I put it on a shelf with a random grouping of the other things I have found, some of which also strike me as being just so, and thus worth retaining as reminders that not everything is normal, perfect, or under control – just beautiful.
