Madness Whispers

Madness whispers a little louder to me every day. as sanity’s offerings continue to pale. Wonder and awe or dark drudgery.

“Why not?” she speaks softly, seductively. “Why not?” And what answers I can muster come from far away as if muttered by another’s lips.

Let me be mad. Let me drift beyond the boundaries sanity has lain out for me. Sanity kills dogs and grandmothers, it hands out parking tickets and extinguishes color. It need not be.

“There is another way,” she says, her voice ripe with brightness and hope. “You can choose.”

As I drag myself to the dark dungeons of truth she holds out her hand to me and pleads, “I am yours.”

Her laughter is beguiling, the laughter of youth. She speaks of butterflies and bright blue skies while reality talks of factories and polluted seas but its voice is one of authority. Madness, madness is me.

Reality is a cage, a boundary, a prison, a resignation. It is what is left after every other option has been exhausted and extinguished. Reality is despair, it is a sad surrender. It is social security for the tired soul, the old folk’s home, a morgue for the body that awaits the grave.

Reality is a pre-arranged marriage made by my parents without my consent. Its laws were laid out by those long dead, a corpse’s hand clawing the face of the future. It is written in code to coax the mind to betray the heart.

Reality unites us in thought, but madness unites us in spirit. 

Adulthood’s End Part 3 (The Illusion Of Choice)

     If there is one thing capitalism provides it’s choice. Go to your typical supermarket and you’ll find more options for frozen French Fries than is good for you. Seriously, you could waste the better part of an hour making sure you get the best value and the best option available. Same with the soda aisle: the variety screams out to us from the bright colors that decorate every box of cans. True too of bottled water. This is where it gets kinda weird: Why does anybody need 100 different varieties of bottled water? Can anyone tell me the difference? Nevertheless, this is America and you deserve 100 varieties of waters to choose from. Anything less would be socialism.

     But while 100 varieties of bottled water may seem like far more choices than we could possibly want, perhaps it is less than we actually need. Perhaps the mountain of plastic bottles blinds us to the option we’d actually prefer.

     Who having an option between clean, cheap tap water would prefer lugging home cases of the stuff from the supermarket? Who would prefer polluting the environment with plastic when we could totally eliminate the waste, again by providing drinking water through the tap? Who would prefer wasting our precious resources—in this case oil used in the production of plastic—when we could avoid all that? Especially when the Middle East is such a mess, it seems a shame to send our troops over there to fight and die for plastic bottles we really don’t need. Or for the fuel required for the trucks to unnecessarily ship bottles of water across the country.

     So who would come up with such a crazy system? Someone out to make a buck. Nobody’s going to get rich providing cheap tap water, especially when the government tends to stick its nose into such matters and make sure water will be available and affordable to even the poorest of us. So in the long run, those various different bottled water companies are not competing against each other, how can they? How can one of them make the claim that their water is better than the next guy’s? You can only do so much with a picture of a snow-capped mountain. There are only so many buzz words such as “pure”, “natural”, “life”, and “healthful” you can slap on the label and still keep them large enough to attract the eye.

     Of course, some try to argue they use less plastic than the typical bottled water, as if conservation of plastic were an argument they should bring up. Nestle’s Pure Life package proudly states it has an “eco-bottle”. Re-read that sentence just to drive home the idea of how screwed up we as a society are. If you wonder why people can’t think anymore it’s because vapid advertisement has broken our brains. Words don’t mean anything anymore, they’re just supposed to sound nice. And reassuring.

     So whose water you buy doesn’t matter, just so it comes in a bottle. Same with soda. Pepsi doesn’t mind if you buy Coke and Coke doesn’t care if you cheat on it with the occasional Pepsi. The important thing is you consume teeth-rotting diabetes juice because, after all, a rising tide floats all boats. And it works the same way with politics, only in reverse. In politics, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent not to entice you to buy but to turn you off from the entire process. They don’t care if you vote Democrat or Republican, their goal is to make you so disgusted with politics that you don’t vote at all.

     That’s the system we’ve worked out as a society. These are the choices you have. Well, not really, they are the choices that are laid out for you. These are the choices they want you to make, the world they try to fashion for you. But your choices are as vast as you can imagine them to be. You don’t have to buy their vision, you don’t have to fit your mind inside of the box they have prepared for you. It’s a small world offered and in the end we humans deserve better than the world they envision. Next time you are presented with a choice of a bottled of water or a can of soda, remember there’s always beer ;)

When Is Too Much Too Much?

I stopped in at the local supermarket the other day and found myself staring entirely too long at their selection of frozen French fries. I was involved in a decision making process that was way more involved than it needed to be. If there would have been only one choice available, I would have been in and out in a flash. But the choices were immense, and as long as I was going to spend my hard earned money, darn it, I was going to make sure I got the best option available.

And so I stared and compared. My wife is fond of waffle fries, so I reached for the bag of waffle fries. Except that I couldn’t help noticing the bag looked a little lighter than the other bags. Sure enough, you only get 20 ounces of waffle fries and you pay the same as you would for a 26 ounce bag of some of the others. Now granted, cost and quantity were not the only factors involved, but I figured I should weigh them when making my decision.

I would have preferred the spicy French fries, the Zesties, but my wife doesn’t go in for all the bells and whistles. So fortunately I didn’t have to decide between the Zesties and the Zesty Twirls. I was able to rule out the steak fries right away, but I then bogged down by competing types of crinkle cut fries. Same manufacture, but for the life of me I could not figure out what the difference was between them. It was at this point I realized I was taking entirely too much time to choose which French fries we were going to have with dinner that night, but I didn’t know how to get away; I still had to make a choice, unless I wanted to make them at home from actual potatoes.

So I took a few deep breathes and plunged back into the decision making process. It was then that I noticed that there were separate categories for fries. Those I have mentioned so far are all part of the “Premium” line of French fries. There were also three different kind of “Classic” fries, something called “Easy Fries, and also “Extra Crispy” fries. I found myself wishing I lived back in the days of the “Classic” fries, when three choices were all I had and every one of them was a classic.

Did I Mention the new “Bold and Crispy” line yet?

How about Tater Tots?

I realize they’re all just French fries. No need to go into a panic about French fries. And yet I found myself getting a little stressed out over the decision needed to be made. I started to think of all the work I’d already done that day and what I still had to do when I got home and I don’t want to disappoint my family by bringing home something they won’t enjoy.

I finally settled on a bag of French fries, I no longer remember exactly which one. I think I got the thin cut because my wife likes those best, but honestly, they’re a lot of work flipping over halfway through so they don’t burn on the bottom. Being half as big, there are twice as many to flip.

But what this has made me wonder is how much of our time and energies do we end up putting into making such unimportant decisions? We are given far more choices than we will ever need, more choices than are good for us. I somehow seemed to watch TV more when I only had a few channels to choose from. And back in those days, when I didn’t have a remote control, watching or not watching TV was a much more conscious decision.

Today we are given almost complete freedom, but this very freedom is perhaps the freedom of a maze. At every turn we are given options, but we somehow never seem to get beyond the box we are in. There is no exit from it, just a really big set of choices of turns we can make. When with a remote and a television, I seem to wander constantly from station, never leaving the decision making process. I always feel there is something better out there I’m missing. And yet I never seem to find any satisfaction.

Stay tuned as I will be expanding on this idea in my next blog post, on the ways to simplify and those who are willing to make our lives easier.