Natural

Burt’s Bees makes very good, mostly-natural personal care products. (That’s post-millennial douchespeak for “soap and shampoo and stuff.”) I like their products because the ingredients are simple and the products work well for me. I prefer to consume things that have as few arcane and potentially lethal components as possible.

Burt’s Bees hasn’t yet announced on their website that they’ve been bought by Clorox for not quite a billion bucks.

Clorox, of course, manufactures bleach, detergents, and the ToiletWand system (“Toss the dirty head, replace and move on”). Their website boasts a Healthier Lives tab where germophobic parents can learn how attempting to destroy all life inside their homes is the pathway to domestic achievement. There’s something very 1950s about that tab. You can be a competent human and parent if your house and children are germ free. “Disinfect and protect,” urges one page. You don’t want to be smelly, vile and ill, do you? I am sure Clorox will exercise only a minimal effect on the Burt’s Bees corporate culture.

Once those hives are cleaned up, of course. I mean…bugs. And roots and…extracts from plants and things. What’s natural? It’s natural to want to protect our homes and children against horrible diseases and filth. It’s natural to want to make a billion dollars. Who among us wouldn’t…?

Suck

Autumn in New England means–leaf blowers. They’re a perfect avatar for America today. They are annoyingly loud, so much so that operators sometimes wear ear protection, though passers-by cannot. They consume gas or electricity. And they eliminate a once-common, healthy chore. Raking. Who wants to rake leaves anymore? Fire up your blower instead.

Raking leaves used to mean a little honest sweat on a chilly day. The skritch, skritch of tines on lawn. The chance to catch up with a neighbor or greet a pedestrian. The resisting feel of piles of papery or damp leaves; the heft of the rake in your shoulders and arms. What have we traded all that for? Deafening noise; gas fumes; and the monotonous back and forth swing of…nothing. We have left something behind and moved to a loud, lazy, polluting place. Right on, America! Do blowers suck?–Nah. They’re just objects, created and then pulled out of factories, off of retail shelves, with a little boost from the marketing machine. They are passive–they do not act or demand; they are demanded. It’s not the blowers that suck.

Escalate

It’s all over the place: everything is getting ratcheted up. It’s been happening for a while. $100 laptop? Now $200. Hedge fund managers? Getting even richer. Kurds? Fiestier. Africa? Nastier. Earth? Warmer–and faster. Population? Yep, dispatching usable space and quality of life everywhere at an ever-increasing rate. What do you do?

You can’t do anything about any of this. Even people who are certainly incompetent, wrong for the job, mean-spirited and so on–a lot of them are caught in the same global forces. China’s power-mad elite controls the rampant population of a filth and disease-strewn post-Communist empire? Nah. Each individual Chinese person doesn’t want to live in a polluted, corrupt hellhole. But collectively, social and market forces have moved them there. President Bush and Darth Cheney pull the strings of the world’s largest economy, long since turned self-indulgent bully? Once, maybe…but they took nothing that wasn’t handed to them by Congress and–yep, check that mirror–the few-ish American people who are interested enough to vote. You can’t do anything about this.

What can you do? Escalate–on your terms. When you go to the gym, try harder. If you have to buy something, buy smarter. Think more about what you consume (physically, intellectually, emotionally). You have to respond to the incredible pressures being brought to bear on you. Stoic philosophy teaches that the only thing you can really change…is yourself. Start kicking. Fight mentally, fight physically. Don’t be content with what the media tells you about the choices you must make to be complete. Define completion on your own terms. Take yourself higher. Become ferociously impatient with what you see and feel–about yourself. Escalate.

Kicking

The point of all this is: to keep a diary of what’s going on. People old enough to remember this stuff know that “blog” is just douchespeak for “web page.” But it’s hard to find a place to just have a web page any more. The WordPress people seem to make this pretty painless.

Kicking and screaming is how we come into the world, unless there’s something wrong with us. We learn to get the screaming under control, many of us. But I think the kicking shouldn’t ever stop. Kicking means we’re aware of what’s happening to us and we want to change it, through movement or running or lashing out or just to change. Kicking means alive. I’m kicking against a current right now, a slow, gray tide that wants to make me quiet. I’ve got strong legs, though.

‘Course, it’s a strong tide, too. I’ll be forty-one in a week and I’ve been unemployed for almost a year. Besides an income, my own place, and a big chunk of self-respect, I’m also out a wife of seventeen years and two incredible daughters. The plan was to have a great job and be able to see them (the kids, son, it’s the kids I’m talkin about here), maybe move nearby. Hasn’t happened. Not for want of trying. Recruiters, networking, job ads, alumni events, joining groups, forming groups, even (eeew) posting to and searching Monster and CareerBuilder…end result: the plan is still only a plan. Except now it’s a plan that recedes like a lighthouse away from shore. Got to keep kicking against that tide.

I refuse to read most of the New York Times, because it’s a catalog of stuff I can’t have. Their recent magazine issue on New York’s new gilded age looked nauseating. Their advertisers don’t have the right to tell me what I should want. Their writers and editors don’t have the privilege of holding up a mirror to show me all I don’t have. Each magazine (I do the crosswords, which are good; thanks for putting that out, guys) has that Lives piece, or whatever it’s called, in the very back. (No, NYT, you don’t get a link. Not yours.) I read this week’s because it looked like it had something to do with the Ramones.

The author is a man who’d tasted some of the punk scene and says he understands why you can’t just put on a brand new T-shirt and assume the heritage. In his piece, his ten year old son asks for a Ramones T-shirt for his birthday. Dad, being a nice little consumer, goes off to the mall and buys him one at Hot Topic. Son puts it on during the party and then rips it climbing a fence or something. Nearly in tears (“Trying Not to Cry”), the boy shows the result to daddy. The dad thinks, “Now it’s real!”–showing the author does indeed understand that clothes reflect the person who inhabits them. Aaaannnd…in the next breath, because this is America in 2007, daddy promises junior a nice new one. And goes and buys him one. Daddy keeps the ripped T for himself.

Exactly what the fuck has been learned from this?

I mean, if we start at the premise that the punk movement rejected, among many other things, the wholesale and unquestioning consumption of mass-produced goods; and if we acknowledge that buying meaning isn’t the same as learning meaning–then hasn’t daddy sold out the very things the punks stood for? Knowingly? With an indulgent smile and a ready credit card? Triumph of the will: dad < market machine. I’m glad I’m not him, and I’m glad my kids aren’t his kid. My ten year old (girl) is made of much stronger moral stuff.  What a pair of pussies.* Daddy’s not kicking, and he’s teaching his kid how not to, either.

*And no, I don’t mean that as a sexist term. “Pussy” is here employed to mean whiner, baby, softie, weakling. For me, these qualities don’t have anything to do with gender.