>>246
You know, I believe I actually bought you in an antique shop once, as the first - or maybe second - birthday present for the child of a young Bohemian couple who lived a couple of floors down from me in one of the glorious filthy old coal-heated apartment houses in East Berlin that have now all been modernized and beautified to fuck.

You were exorbitantly expensive - I think I paid about 150 Euros for you - because you were a genuine turn-of-the-century "early mechanical toy", but I'd particularly wanted to get something classy and distinguished for Martin and Christine's kid's birthday because I was actually far, far too old and weird to really belong in their social circle and was desperate to manufacture some "function" for myself in their life by one means or another.

As it turned out, purchasing you was an enormous mistake - and was actually probably the catalyst for the swift decay of my friendship with the young couple which then ensued. It was obvious just from your evident extreme age and the quality of your workmanship that I had spent some utterly disproportionate amount of money on you and, in the mixed emotions of the young parents, embarassment and even resentment soon came to strongly predominate over gratitude.

Things might not have been so bad, though, if you had not still been in good working order. But you were, and the intensity and duration of the racket you were capable of making with those cymbals, once you were wound up and set in motion, was an impressive, though in this case dismaying, testimony to the excellence of artisanship of the toymakers of the previous century. Far from becoming the source of shared familial joy that I had intended you to be, you became a morbid sadistic obsession for the young child and a torment to both the young parents. I was never invited to their home again.