A Liberal Citizen recently asked if I was ok, since I hadn't written a post in over a month. Even during my blogging break during the summer, I still posted a link to something here or there, but I just haven't felt like writing anything that wasn't fiction or related to baseball. Despite my contentment for the changing political climate, I feel weary from the atmosphere of war and inequality and disease and mudslinging and religious hypocrites. To the few people left who drop by from time to time, thank you.
When I wrote much of this post last night in a green Mead spiral notebook with a Cincinnati Reds pen, I was sitting at a bar across the street from a busy Whole Foods. The necessity of killing an hour was upon me, as I had ended my work day at the time when a bus rider is treated like livestock as he stands in a packed aisle amidst smells of B.O. and fried fast food dinners, the sickening artificial heat cranked to the coatless bus driver's comfort level. There is not room for the rider to take off his winter garb, so he fights dizziness and beads of sweat on his angry brow, wondering why he must spend fifty bucks a month for such an unpleasant two hours of his day.
But I digress. At the bar - the new Stoney's, opened a year after developers kicked them out of their old location to make more condos or whatever the hell master-to-slave project it was that victimized another longtime Washington establishment - I stared out the window across the street into the windows of a trying-to-be-responsible grocery store, watching the shoppers move around like ants collecting food. From the stool at the bar, I could see the Processors - you know, the kind who take ten years to make their purchases, the ones who wait until the total has come up before they start searching for their wallets or their checkbooks, or those who have to dig around their purses for exact change or who have to tell the cashier their life stories while lines form to the back of the store. The people moved haphazardly among the various products, so many necessary and unnecessary products in packages of all shapes and colors, boxes and bags and cartons and cans, and as I watched them through that window, the humans looked no different than the animals they are.
In my blogging absence, I turned 30 years old, a very reflective year for those of us who are inclined towards contemplation and thought rather than mindless ritual. As misfortune has befriended me on occasion, I find myself wondering why I haven't accomplished any of my goals I wanted to achieve by age 30. I realize it's just a number, a very round and symbolic number, but it stands in stark contrast to the carefree days of the twenties, when age is only something that describes rotten food in one's refrigerator or the people in a retirement home. Turning 30 is like New Year's Day, when people make resolutions because they think that it is a good time to turn their lives around or do something they've been meaning to do for awhile. I mean, why can't one vow to start losing weight on August 2, or clean out the attic on March 23, or quit smoking on June 6? So what if I haven't achieved anything worthwhile - it's not like it's too late or anything, right?
Anyway, as I watched the shoppers gather their products, I thought about the social system of ants. As Darwin and many others have noted, the life of a worker ant sucks. The Queen controls their lives, makes them slave away for food and shelter, all the while getting fatter like the wallets of corporate executives. The shoppers had given the Queen their labor and were gathering the food as their reward. I simply watched them, watched their movement, stared at them like they were part of a shifting, evolving painting, and thought how strange life is and how overly complicated human beings make it. Because when all the superficiality and pretense are stripped from life like it was when there were two windows between me and the shoppers, it's pretty clear that we are no different than ants marching on their quest for survival.
___
When I wrote much of this post last night in a green Mead spiral notebook with a Cincinnati Reds pen, I was sitting at a bar across the street from a busy Whole Foods. The necessity of killing an hour was upon me, as I had ended my work day at the time when a bus rider is treated like livestock as he stands in a packed aisle amidst smells of B.O. and fried fast food dinners, the sickening artificial heat cranked to the coatless bus driver's comfort level. There is not room for the rider to take off his winter garb, so he fights dizziness and beads of sweat on his angry brow, wondering why he must spend fifty bucks a month for such an unpleasant two hours of his day.
But I digress. At the bar - the new Stoney's, opened a year after developers kicked them out of their old location to make more condos or whatever the hell master-to-slave project it was that victimized another longtime Washington establishment - I stared out the window across the street into the windows of a trying-to-be-responsible grocery store, watching the shoppers move around like ants collecting food. From the stool at the bar, I could see the Processors - you know, the kind who take ten years to make their purchases, the ones who wait until the total has come up before they start searching for their wallets or their checkbooks, or those who have to dig around their purses for exact change or who have to tell the cashier their life stories while lines form to the back of the store. The people moved haphazardly among the various products, so many necessary and unnecessary products in packages of all shapes and colors, boxes and bags and cartons and cans, and as I watched them through that window, the humans looked no different than the animals they are.
In my blogging absence, I turned 30 years old, a very reflective year for those of us who are inclined towards contemplation and thought rather than mindless ritual. As misfortune has befriended me on occasion, I find myself wondering why I haven't accomplished any of my goals I wanted to achieve by age 30. I realize it's just a number, a very round and symbolic number, but it stands in stark contrast to the carefree days of the twenties, when age is only something that describes rotten food in one's refrigerator or the people in a retirement home. Turning 30 is like New Year's Day, when people make resolutions because they think that it is a good time to turn their lives around or do something they've been meaning to do for awhile. I mean, why can't one vow to start losing weight on August 2, or clean out the attic on March 23, or quit smoking on June 6? So what if I haven't achieved anything worthwhile - it's not like it's too late or anything, right?
Anyway, as I watched the shoppers gather their products, I thought about the social system of ants. As Darwin and many others have noted, the life of a worker ant sucks. The Queen controls their lives, makes them slave away for food and shelter, all the while getting fatter like the wallets of corporate executives. The shoppers had given the Queen their labor and were gathering the food as their reward. I simply watched them, watched their movement, stared at them like they were part of a shifting, evolving painting, and thought how strange life is and how overly complicated human beings make it. Because when all the superficiality and pretense are stripped from life like it was when there were two windows between me and the shoppers, it's pretty clear that we are no different than ants marching on their quest for survival.
___
