I’m not feeling terribly sentimental about much these days.
I do feel a compulsion to stay close, to stay in touch, with a few people but my sense is that’s a strategy for an anticipated need for comfort at some point down the line. So I’m hanging around and watching what the earth gives up, offers, that is, and I watch, peripherally, as our entitlement to its riches, its lessons, are ignored and, like a bigot would a slave we treat it with a similar dismissive attitude; our right to subjugate man reflects our indifference toward the method by which we acquire and manipulate natural resources that just simply must meet our immediate demands.
So why be sentimental? Why lament a fait accompli?
I don’t. I am eating my way through it. Literally.
Our capacity for delusion is our mind’s most evolved accomplishment. We sort through garbage, yet press on. Hope spawned by denial.
Understand this: your work is your life. Separation does not exist. As Bill Callahan sings, “life is not confidential”.
Man has the capacity to spend his days conceiving of ways to exhaust the remaining breath of an already ailing planet and then spend those “hard earned” dollars on philanthropic endeavors and not notice the irony. Daily we refine the great con.
Money Making versus Wealth Creation: greed is a better fighter, a malignant tumor arising from base survival instinct. If there is only one thing you want, one thing for which you’re fighting, you’ll stop at nothing to get it. But if that for which you fight is a large, ambiguous, multifaceted approach to an ideal you’re pretty sure is the best thing…well, that pretty much says it all, I think. Agnostics didn’t drive the Crusades.
Philanthropies arise from the wreckage left behind by our own ambitions: new diseases being the obvious example, or the preservation of grand traditions or the magnificent feats of man. Translated: our ability to tag the wild with the blood of our brothers + time equals a great accomplishment, a marvel to be protected and preserved at thousand dollar a plate society functions.
So who gives a fuck? Eat your way through it.
There are more restaurants opening in our urban centers than ever before. They all seem to be sustainable, organic and local. And I am folgarth, trinsaptic and relmandian: the new buzzwords of a better way of being, the right way, the conscientious way. Only these words started out meaningless, so they have nowhere to go but up, or at least to be honored with a definition to then be watered down. The new age of relentlessly whipping the nag is that of stretching the definitions of words to suit our fat ass ideas. Buzzwords are Goombahs in track suits.
Our delusional excellence allows us to embrace empty words, at least while someone is looking, like a highfalutin coffee table book properly placed so every guest can see it. Biodynamic is trendy, so I try to look for it on the label and it’s all I buy…as long as it doesn’t cost too much. I mean, in our time of acceptable last minute texted cancellations and rescheduling, society is quietly colluding, ducking & dodging accountability together. Belief does not necessarily come with conviction included, those days are on the wane.
Changing one’s mind is not the problem. That should happen. That is evolution.
Our half-assed latching on to an idea is just the result of effective marketing. Marketing is the persistent winner: it’s easy when we barely have time to read a granola bar label because we have a phone call and are late for that thing and have to cancel that other thing and did you see my tweet?
Eating is still a really good time.
Using some words on labels or as labels can get expensive as words can be bought, owned and subjugated in the same vertically integrated delusional chain that began with that hole I drilled in the ground, using a draught horse while my tractor rested in the garage, of course. Demeter has trademarked the word Biodynamic, just to add to the cost of the shit we bury in our garden and herbs we sprinkle over our compost. So you and I pay some entity for the right to practice what was intended as a healthy, holistic and compassionate approach to growing food and living life. A set of rituals created to impel us to open our eyes to nature is now properly owned and marketed…just as nature intended. The debt circle of the healthy hippie ideology spins my mind more than a mu-mu wearing aisle dancer gone dervish at the crescendo of a really tight Scarlet->Fire.
Don’t get worked up over it. Just ignore it. And pass the butter.
It doesn’t matter if you’re 90 years old and running a marathon or 19 years old, drinking a 50 ounce Mountain Dew while chain smoking Newports and riding over to the fried Oreo booth at the county fair on your propane fueled wheel-chair-motor-bike that you named “Marathon”. We’re all compost. Who knows what type of plant will be growing out of our hopped up corpses in a hundred years. Monsanto is already devising a seed that will thrive in the chemical cocktail we’ll leave behind. It’s expensive and somehow, I heard, is adding a percentage on to the death tax?
What does it matter? Eat through it.
The truth is, fried Oreo or organically grown tomato from your own garden, eating is one of our few remaining affordable pleasures. Get it while you can because the price of our meals is not sustainable, not unless we all spend more time gardening and less time fighting wars or practicing other diversion tactics. Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be computer programmers…or defense contractors, for that matter.
My greatest pleasure is eating, and my definition of eating encompasses the act of preparing my meal as well. Sometimes, it even includes looking for it, raising it and killing it and, of course, growing it.
The act is ongoing and it lasts longer than sex and is more active than watching a movie and just as diverting which, in the end, keeps my mind on much more pleasant things. Pleasing my palate as an end goal for a lifestyle choice….