degringolade

Impressionism / Stefan Dimitrescu/ Balchik Corner

Sunday morning up and at-em. The laundry room was out of commission for a couple of weeks while they replaced water pipes so I was running on my last dregs of clean clothes. A couple of loads today, then when I call in on Tuesday I will run a couple more loads and I will be caught up.

Going through another purge phase. Just went through the kitchen cabinets and threw three (3) kitchen sized garbage bags of shit that I don’t use away. Usually I take this kind of stuff to Goodwill and let them sell it to the less fortunate. This time I didn’t. The reason this time is different is the state of mind I am in right now. I usually just look at the encrustation of unnecessary crap in my life in an amused, slightly self-deprecatory way. My acquisitiveness is now seen as a serious problem, because everything that I have seems to weigh me down in some way or another. Where I used to give things to the Goodwill as “someone should be able to use this” has transmogrified into “what kind of idiot would buy this in the first place”.

So into the dumpster it goes.

More and more, I am coming to believe that the root of all evil is not the corporate capitalists who work so busily to manufacture our perceived needs, but it lies in ourselves. We seem to have a deep-seated need to gather shit around us as a defensive barrier against the vagaries of a world that our species is in the process of fucking up pretty badly.

Now, just in case you are wondering if I am going full Kazinski, the answer is pretty much “No”. Now, granted, his description of the process being “feted” as modernism and progress is pretty spot on. His tactics and lifestyles do leave a lot to be desired.

All that we are here in the modern progressive world is ephemera. Our lives of quiet desperation and inconsequence are the prices paid for dreams that we dream that are fed by others leading the same lives. But that is the nature of our society. It is how we have overshot the carrying capacity of the planet to an astonishing degree. This overfed desire for more that originates in the inconsequence of the individual and feeds the machinery of commerce that fills that unfillable void is what brought us here.

We have met the enemy and he is us.