Category Archives: consumerism

On going home

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I have been gone for 86 days–almost three months on the road. People often ask, “How can you stay away for so long?” but I always ask, “How come you never get away?” Home is where you make it. It isn’t a building or a city, it’s not a house that you built or an apartment you rent. Your home is where your heart is, to coin a cliche, so, in a sense, I am always home, whether I am at the cabin in northern Minnesota, or the farm, or in Europe. I have long since ceased being a tourist, even when I’m touring a castle, passing through customs, or checking a map. I ride the subway as if I were a local, brandishing my transport pass as if I had lived there twenty years. In sense, I am always going home–to the farm, in the city, at the university, on the plains of central Texas. One should not obsess one way or another about what “home” means. I find that the journey home is so much easier to make when I am going somewhere that looks, smells, and feels like home. I can wait in airport–which is not home, definitely not home–when I know that the plane I am waiting for is going “home.” Home is more about the people and less about the stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I love my stuff, but stuff will never love you and can always be replaced–not so true about the human element. So if you are going home and will see folks, greet them for me, tell them I am fine, and that I will be there soon.

On not making any sense

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I think that at times our success-oriented society demands too much rationality and order from all of us. I mean, look, unless you are obsessive compulsive about being neat and orderly, society really frowns on you. I prefer to have a messy desk, a few stacks of books, a pile or two of papers, and a disorderly briefcase. Why? Why wouldn’t everyone prefer to keep things in perfect order all the time? Because the world of thought and imagination is anything but orderly. Too orderly means predictable, and predictable is boring. The human imagination, out of where all of our best creations have emerged, is any extremely unpredictable and messy place, but you have to feed it. If you keep an orderly imagination, it will wither and die from loneliness, feeling abandoned and unkept. Chaos, disorder, fragmentation, non-linearity, and strangeness all feed a healthy imagination which is constantly running away to join the circus. The imagination makes no sense whatsoever, but without it, creativity and the healthy mind are nowhere, boxed and shoved off into whatever closet they have been thrown. Whenever two objects come in contact that never had any business coming into contact, there lurks the opportunity of something new happening, which may be irreverent, irrational, and unintended, but that’s how new ideas come about. The success-oriented society of over-consumerism, abject capitalism, and blind success cannot survive an active imagination that wishes to shed itself of false parameters for success and spurious myths about materialism and money. The creative process, for as nutty and unreasonable that it has to be, is about liberating the spirit, giving flight to dreams, and allowing the individual to shed the heavy yoke of mainstream capitalism and consumerism in favor of spiritual freedom, whatever that might mean to any given individual. We don’t always have to make sense, stay in line, keep our mouths shut, or blindly accept what the powers that be feed us.

On not making any sense

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I think that at times our success-oriented society demands too much rationality and order from all of us. I mean, look, unless you are obsessive compulsive about being neat and orderly, society really frowns on you. I prefer to have a messy desk, a few stacks of books, a pile or two of papers, and a disorderly briefcase. Why? Why wouldn’t everyone prefer to keep things in perfect order all the time? Because the world of thought and imagination is anything but orderly. Too orderly means predictable, and predictable is boring. The human imagination, out of where all of our best creations have emerged, is any extremely unpredictable and messy place, but you have to feed it. If you keep an orderly imagination, it will wither and die from loneliness, feeling abandoned and unkept. Chaos, disorder, fragmentation, non-linearity, and strangeness all feed a healthy imagination which is constantly running away to join the circus. The imagination makes no sense whatsoever, but without it, creativity and the healthy mind are nowhere, boxed and shoved off into whatever closet they have been thrown. Whenever two objects come in contact that never had any business coming into contact, there lurks the opportunity of something new happening, which may be irreverent, irrational, and unintended, but that’s how new ideas come about. The success-oriented society of over-consumerism, abject capitalism, and blind success cannot survive an active imagination that wishes to shed itself of false parameters for success and spurious myths about materialism and money. The creative process, for as nutty and unreasonable that it has to be, is about liberating the spirit, giving flight to dreams, and allowing the individual to shed the heavy yoke of mainstream capitalism and consumerism in favor of spiritual freedom, whatever that might mean to any given individual. We don’t always have to make sense, stay in line, keep our mouths shut, or blindly accept what the powers that be feed us.

On going too fast

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We lead lives of quiet desperation as we chase from one thing to the next, blind to our own panic and our senseless running to and fro in order to make everything work. We speed, break all the traffic laws, destroy our nerves, put ourselves in danger, put others in harm’s way. There is no sense of meditation or self-reflection or self-awareness in our wild chasing between appointments and deadlines. We are totally unaware of the danger into which haste and hurry put us. The modern connectivity of our digital gadgets is driving us all to distraction. We are all over-committed, over-booked, and over-worked because we can’t say no, and we let the tail wag the dog. I actually yearn for the simpler days when phones were on kitchen walls, we were unreachable when out of the house, we could walk to work and school, and we had limited reasonable commitments. We no longer have time for even the most casual moment to relax and smell the roses, have a cup of coffee, talk with a friend, drive reasonably to the next thing–or maybe even not have a next thing? I have written about time poverty in the past and its relationship to digital media and constant on-line connectivity, but I think that American society has hit a moment of critical mass of appointments, meetings, lessons, sporting events, reunions, and events. All of which makes for a very full and interesting life, but it also leads to forgetfulness, missed appointments, frustration, speeding tickets, red lights, and disappointment. One of my resolutions for this year is to just slow down.

On going too fast

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We lead lives of quiet desperation as we chase from one thing to the next, blind to our own panic and our senseless running to and fro in order to make everything work. We speed, break all the traffic laws, destroy our nerves, put ourselves in danger, put others in harm’s way. There is no sense of meditation or self-reflection or self-awareness in our wild chasing between appointments and deadlines. We are totally unaware of the danger into which haste and hurry put us. The modern connectivity of our digital gadgets is driving us all to distraction. We are all over-committed, over-booked, and over-worked because we can’t say no, and we let the tail wag the dog. I actually yearn for the simpler days when phones were on kitchen walls, we were unreachable when out of the house, we could walk to work and school, and we had limited reasonable commitments. We no longer have time for even the most casual moment to relax and smell the roses, have a cup of coffee, talk with a friend, drive reasonably to the next thing–or maybe even not have a next thing? I have written about time poverty in the past and its relationship to digital media and constant on-line connectivity, but I think that American society has hit a moment of critical mass of appointments, meetings, lessons, sporting events, reunions, and events. All of which makes for a very full and interesting life, but it also leads to forgetfulness, missed appointments, frustration, speeding tickets, red lights, and disappointment. One of my resolutions for this year is to just slow down.

On butter

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What can one say about butter that is not self-serving rationalization for indulging in the richest food on the planet, except for the fat around a cow’s liver? I, for one, love butter, but I think that this is a relationship that is best left alone. Overindulgence in butter is the road to perdition in many ways–cholesterol, heart disease, obesity, hypertension. Yet, I won’t put oleo on my toast because using a petroleum product would be worse. You see, butter has that taste that just sucks you in and hypnotizes your taste buds and seduces your good judgement. You ever sauté garlic in butter? Maybe throw in a few over-sized shrimp, a pinch of hot red pepper and a quarter cup of white wine? You’d know if you had. Butter is a synecdoche for all of our overindulgence and overeating, and butter stands out as a symbol of our own success which may be our very undoing. In itself, there is nothing wrong with eating some butter. I’m from a dairy state, Minnesota, where the local denizens having been consuming dairy products for over a century and a half, and the only long-lasting result is extended life-spans. We have collectively stopped smoking, and although we still drink a bit and carry around an extra pound or two, we are pretty healthy in spite of the butter we consume. What would pancakes be without butter? What would chocolate frosting be without butter? Lumpy and tasteless. Take away their butter and people would stop making toast and life would cease to have meaning. Can you really eat lobster without a nice butter sauce to dip it in? Chicken fried in butter is much better than chicken fried in mystery oil. Yet butter gets a bad reputation because of all that juicy cholesterol. I often wonder if it might be less the cholesterol we consume and more our own inactivity which hurts us. So getting off the couch and into the wide open spaces is more important than skimping on the butter for our bagel.

de sic transit gloria mundi

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How amazing is it that we lose all sense of what is important while we run blindly after all of the crap we think we need–cars, houses, electronics, entertainment, gold, the list is endless. Not that I mind living in a world filled with all of these interesting trappings, but they are a distraction. Before we know it, however, we have lost ourselves in a sea of desire, lusting after the newest and latest gizmo, toy, or must have thing or service. This desire to have it all is neither new nor surprising. Since people have been people, we have been lusting after the next great thing–fire, the wheel, writing. Yet as the spinners spin and our lives play out before us, we are completely blind to the finite nature of our own existence, the fact that man-made things a perishable and temporal, and that there is absolutely nothing under the sun that will change those first two assertions. The Brinks truck will not come to the cemetery as you molder in your coffin and dump in your money before they close the lid. The physical, in spite of outward appearances, is temporal and will eventually pass away in spite of our intentions. We might erect monuments, put up plaques and statues, construct buildings of brick and mortar, but time will eventually tear it all down, and everything will eventually return to the dust from which it came. What will last, you ask? Sic transit gloria mundi How doth the busy bee, Dum vivimus vivamus, I stay my enemy! Emily Dickinson

de sic transit gloria mundi

Posted on by

How amazing is it that we lose all sense of what is important while we run blindly after all of the crap we think we need–cars, houses, electronics, entertainment, gold, the list is endless. Not that I mind living in a world filled with all of these interesting trappings, but they are a distraction. Before we know it, however, we have lost ourselves in a sea of desire, lusting after the newest and latest gizmo, toy, or must have thing or service. This desire to have it all is neither new nor surprising. Since people have been people, we have been lusting after the next great thing–fire, the wheel, writing. Yet as the spinners spin and our lives play out before us, we are completely blind to the finite nature of our own existence, the fact that man-made things a perishable and temporal, and that there is absolutely nothing under the sun that will change those first two assertions. The Brinks truck will not come to the cemetery as you molder in your coffin and dump in your money before they close the lid. The physical, in spite of outward appearances, is temporal and will eventually pass away in spite of our intentions. We might erect monuments, put up plaques and statues, construct buildings of brick and mortar, but time will eventually tear it all down, and everything will eventually return to the dust from which it came. What will last, you ask? Sic transit gloria mundi How doth the busy bee, Dum vivimus vivamus, I stay my enemy! Emily Dickinson