An odd life revealed in the odd light of Pinterest

Of late, I have dabbled in Pinterest, and it has dabbled in me.

If you don’t know what the photographic social Internet site is, the thing is harder to explain than to describe.

At first, I thought it was a place mostly where females collected the bobbles and bangles, fashion and artistic imagery that attracted them. Without me being told so, the site seemed ardently feminine, if not female.

So then I started collecting images of things I loved -- mostly photos of steam engines, old English sports cars, trucks, and ancient biplanes. Eventually I will get around to square-rigged sailing ships, brass nautical timepieces and perhaps kaleidoscopes. I love contraptions.

The truth is that I have almost no idea how any of these artifacts worked.

Then I started to collect photos of men in hats, because men not only wear hats, but the hats also wear them. It's symbiotic and personal.

I am not a mechanic or mechanical. My devotion is sensory. I am captured by the image of things. I remember smells. And the shade of light at certain hours of the day. The feel of a beaten-up baseball in your sweaty hand. The warm breeze over Florida sand in 1952.

My life has less about facts than about feelings and senses.

I usually write sentence or two on the Pinterest image to identify the picture and place it in the menu of my memories.

But as with Facebook, people can "friend" you as a follower of what you collect. Or perhaps they are only tipping their hats in recognition of another odd person in the room.

So now about two dozen or so "friends" follow my "pins" but, for the life of me, I can't understand why because these little collections of inanimate mechanical and haberdashery arts are mostly the product of my oddly convoluted mind. 

I have no interest in photos of antique wedding gowns - no interest or animosity, either - and cannot explain why any woman would find a long-dead steam engine to be lovely.

Maybe they see the same elegant, charming architectural lines and hidden forms in a gown that I see in an 1885 Baldwin steam engine.

I never shared in my collecting before - ever. Sharing hidden joys has been the quality of life that I have never mastered. It's getting a little late in the day to start, even if I had the interest, though I am always open to new ideas, in a theoretical sense.

And while I can explain to myself the sad devotion required to remember a steam engine that was scrapped 60 years ago, how could I explain it to anyone else and not sound like a total eccentric? How can you explain the unrequited pain of yearning for what will never exist gain?

Most of the cinematic faces I have admired are long gone and exist only as electronic bits of information. And nobody wears hats these days, except as costumes.

As of late, I have thought of my eccentric qualities and how some people have found them amusing, but most find them unsettling at best and downright discouraging in most cases. You usually know why someone dislikes you and at least have the satisfaction of disliking them in return. But why they care is harder to deduce.

Of most curiousness, almost all of my Pinterest "friends" are women, and there is no sign any of them know who I am or would care about these topics even if they did know me. I do not follow them our any of their interests, a fact that adds to my glum eccentricities, I suppose.

Perhaps I see too little beauty in too few things to actually be a devotee of life's grander attractions. Maybe my collection of random images of my past –both real and hoped for - is testament to a selfish life.

There is minimal joy in that realization. I wish I cared more about almost everything, and lament that I do not. There is no joy in being revealed as relentlessly odd.