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Nutshell Kingdom: Rant
2008
From the comment board at Adbusters (it was an article about the Pabst Blue Ribbon thing):
"...here is a significant reason why I would buy PBR instead of Strohs: most other cheap beers have f'n ugly graphic design. I don't want to see those cans in the party or in my recycling bin."
I am always hestitant nowadays to write about the culture stream; I often find myself disagreeing with every single person I know and yet still feeling a heartsick, horrible premonitory sensation. I suppose it makes me angry to see absurd nonsense like this because it hits so close to home: I do this too...sometimes (but not when I'm being mindful). Honestly, do I, you, we care what our recycling bin looks like? Is our refuse cool enough? does it say what we want said about us, project our (real or imagined...probably imagined) self into the world and onto the curbside every Tuesday?
Shit. I get very caught up in this kind of thing. I take it too personally; I feel the manipulation heavier than most, I guess. It makes me mourn. It makes me feel like a sociopath.
I want to like people. I really do. There's something to them, y'know? The way they move, the way they look at you, even the way they talk sometimes, the things they say.
I just can't stand the way they buy things...and in a culture where branding (honestly, churches unashamedly brand themselves to attract certain desirable demographics...this I get to see first-hand, this marketing of a specific spiritual path) and how one chooses to spend one's money makes more of a difference than voting ... well, that's a pretty big obastacle.
I'll go back to poetry now. And write lines like yesterday's:
Tired of being nothing in a world of things,
I have made a place that doesn't exist.
There we will slip into the trees.
