"YOUR ANSWER HERE"

In a forgotten room in a neglected building in the still-wild west there sits a machine, one whose mirrored facades boast of an ability to not only to provide a user’s weight, but also to answer a question of the user’s choosing. I stood at and studied this machine a long time when I found it, and I have carried many of its questions with me. 

This machine was located in a public facility for at least six decades. At some point, it saw use heavy enough to wear down the metal edges of the coin slot. The platform on which a user stands is made of heavy cast metal, as is the entire pedestal. The original service card is visible through a small window on the back side of the machine, and notes, “Made Only by Watling Scale Co., 4650 W. Fulton St., Chicago 44, Illinois” (I excluded images of this card here, as an owner’s name and address is handwritten on it). In addition to the signage etched into the glass, a red-on-white sign beckons to all passersby, “Have you gained or lost weight?” 

When one stands on this machine, one faces a large mirror that reflected thousands of faces over many years. When I stood on the scale I felt like mine was the first in a decade to be not just glancing but taking time to be looking into the glass. I read the text: “Dreams—What Do Your Dreams Fortell?” “Fortunes—On Love, Marriage, Finance, Home, Surprises.” “Questions and Answers Changed Frequently.” Answers to universal human truths, what challenges us all, etched in a mirror in gold, yellow, and black. My face looked back at me in the silver: unshaven, hair mussed, growing older. In the years that followed the production of these machines, I wonder if the Watling Scale Co. actually issued to owners new fabric ribbons, actually did provide over 200 more questions and answers. Light from the lone window in the small room illuminated the glass panels: one noted my weight (zero, until a coin is inserted), and a larger one that showed my chosen question and answer. I realized then I had no change in my pocket, and that I would only ever be able to guess if this machine really worked. I had not been alone when I entered the room and found this machine, but at that moment I realized I was alone. 

I turned the knob that advanced the fabric roll of printed questions. Some dealt with work and careers, but others were mammoth, questions about the direction of one’s life, of love, of commitment and deceit, of last night's behavior, and of actions to come. I tried to imagine the people who, for their pocket change decades ago, allowed this machine to pose and answer these questions for them. They were hopeful and vibrant folks no doubt, decked out and dressed up. I wondered then if this machine was made with the young in mind, and that our interest in our dreams and fortunes changes with time. I knew that many, if not all, of the people who stood on this scale before me were gone from the high desert now, along with their dreams and fortunes. Long gone too was the man who spent his fortune on constructing the building where this machine and I stood. The people that posed these questions to themselves are gone, but these questions, printed on fabric ribbon, remain and persist, to be asked and answered again and again. I turned the wheel, photographing any questions that hit me (the best handful are presented in this post). I understood then that these questions-- not the machine-- were not the property of the man whose name is still written on the owner’s card, or the property of the owner of the building where this machine sits. I realized these questions, having been asked and answered by humans across generations, had come to defy ownership. Reading them was and is and always will be free, inherent by the design of this machine. 

I would like to believe that each of us has a machine like this one inside ourselves—ever shouting at us answers to “over 200 different questions," a beckoning to understanding that becomes part of our daily ritual and how we live our lives, still shining and reflective after many, many years. Stepping on to such a machine and asking and answering questions about ourselves can be risky business, however, and seems to have fallen terribly out of fashion. I wonder if such a machine placed in a shopping mall today might be less popular than photo booths or candy machines. Perhaps my view is clouded by recent experience, but I know so many who have ceased, or at least appear to have ceased, the practice of asking almost any questions of themselves, preferring to fill days with distraction, intoxication, or even the reliable haze of pharmaceutical anti-depressants. No matter the method, it is incredibly easy to allow questions of these type to fall away. We can stay busy and exhausted, or we can put ourselves on about being busy and exhausted. Questions about who we really are and what we're really doing can be accepted as more distractions, from our enjoyment of ourselves as we run out the clock. Like a confident drunk driver, ignorance takes the wheel and drives so many headlong into another unsteady-and-therefore-not-dull day. The risk is obviously not worth the reward, and the indulgent thrill of apathy can kill. I hope those I care about-- myself included-- are crushed and soon by the weight of introspection and self-knowledge no lighter than this machine. 

Enlightenment was never the purpose of this machine—it was built to collect pocket change. But its questions, likely written by a scale company employee in Chicago more than half a century ago, remain free for the reading. Discerning the meaning of our dreams, or meditating on our futures and fortunes, are valuable activities. Bravery, however, is required, to step upon this or some similar metaphorical machine, and to allow oneself to be challenged by over two hundred questions, or twenty, or two. Of course this is hard work, and cannot be done all day; one needs to be elsewhere than standing around on this scale to actually find answers. I hope its questions haunt us all. Without having been able to test it, and without having ever seen one of its answers, I will only ever be able to guess at how well this machine works. For your sake and mine, I have decided that it does indeed work, and better than any of us could ever imagine.