From the monthly archives: September 2006
Dearest Franklin Enstein,
I regretfully must inform you of this woeful misfortune. It should seem that your mother has been enchanted by yet another stray and looks to kick you by the wayside.
Why, I myself have been dealt a series of distressful tussles from this vixen of the viverridae. I too have found myself loathsome on the streets with nary a tuna can to my name. Finding myself pawing at the parameters of the pestilence of this forsaken society that we dwell amongst.
Yet, I keep coming back. I will be with you in spirit throughout these most trying of times young Roosevelt.
Yours in good faith,
Joey
Rack Dept. Analyst
This post was inspired by my darling Red Rollerskate.
I used to steal Sassy magazine from the North Merrick Public Library. This was a bold departure since my big sister, whom in my youth I held as a standard of normalcy, read only Cosmopolitan. Don’t get a confused teenage girl wrong, I delved into her stash and took the Are you a vamp quizzes and opened up all the perfume samplers but the magazine, consisting mostly of advertisements like this, was more foreign to me than National Geographic. But Sassy I liked.
For a gal who spent the remainder of her high school years in a silk-screened vintage Girls Scout uniform, carrying around a purse made out of a marshmellow fluff container and writing a zines, Sassy was an inspiration and allowed me to feel less alienated in the pre-mainstreaming of grunge era, as it did for many young women pubertizing in the early 90′s. Then grunge hit and every teenager seemed to get in touch with there inner dirtbag weirdo, be it just a phase or a true blue blooming of dormant weirdness. Either way, as with anything mass-consumed, the trendiness diluted the founding principles and the ship started to sink. Sassy soon followed this fate.
Enter Jane. One would like to believe that Jane Pratt, Sassy’s head honcho, had created a magazine for us who had grown up with Sassy and fit no mag demographic, still, in our adult years. But Jane is a terrible magazine on a par with Cosmo-”101 ways to excite him in bed”-politan. But never fear, one can always make use of old issues by considering it a parody, like Mad or Cracked, or…. DECOUPAGE!
Dear Aldo,
I write to you from an abandoned farm in an indescript rural town about 15 miles or so from Interstate-80, the massive throughway that stretches from New York to California. Yes, our great country is completely engulfed in a web of asphalt now and it is difficult to find a land that is not gated, owned, trimmed or tamed. In an attempt to free myself from an environment that more closely resembles a circus, I’ve travel west in search of nothing. Nowadays it seems every inch of our nation has been touched by development and I, not made of plastic nor glowing in neon nor graphed on a pie chart, am finding it near impossible to experience nature.
What have we done to the land? Well, large retail stores, some with over 100,000 square feet of merchandise, have created residential clusters in their geographic vicinities because living more than 3 miles from the opportunity to purchase electric detachable toothbrush heads, 5-gallon tubs of mayonnaise, or undergarments with witty phrases on them is just not an option many folks consider. Land is hunted, not by nature-enthusiasts, but by developers and real estate agencies. Their wooden sign posts mark new ventures, living communities of cloned impersonal homes and retail stores. Our culture has become simplified and reduced to ad slogans, emblems and trademarks, one more meaningless than the next.
But I have escaped for now. I sit on a damp patch of grass as I write to you, discouraged and tired. Yet upon the Earth, and within the breeze and scurrying insects, my head is calm– the collective hum of nature at work is my salvation. They make compact discs with these sounds of nature, you know? Active streams, the loquacious chirping of the wren and pitter-pattering of a wild fawn have been encased within a circular optical disc for our convenience. It really is quite silly.
So what has happened? The business side of things has infiltrated, and now dominates, every faucet of our existence here in America– politics, food, waste management, tennis shoes, healthcare, farming, education, and so on and so forth. Remember agriculture? Now it is agribusiness. The speed and profit-driven quest for increased output at a lower cost has pushed manufacturers to cut corners. Adherence to the Environmental Protection Agency’s loosely monitored guidelines is often sacrificed to help with what the business-types call “the bottom line”. To translate, money is top priority.
A man often finds great pleasure in being correct, be it a testament to their keen intuition, brilliance or expertise. Yet I’m afraid you will not rejoice in being correct this time. You wrote of a world depleted and run ravaged by its own people. We are there now. I write to you because you knew the fate of the machine of industry. Besides the effects on the natural world (e.g. the pollution, drought and famine), industry has manufactured a social isolation amongst American citizens. I feel alien here, a nation that had such potential for greatness that continues to spiral down a path of greed and amorality.
The people of the present day need to understand the impact of their careless stomps. Their participation in an evil cycle perpetuates it. They need to understand that there are alternatives to finding fulfillment through consumption and, if they must bestow such an importance to materialism, that it is within their ability to contribute, or at least not exploit further, to the natural world around them by patronizing socially and environmentally progressive companies that can supply them with goods with a lesser impact on the earth and its resources. If the people can grasp that they have a responsibility greater than their own immediate gratifications then a shift in consumer demand will have businesses altering their products, and how they are manufactured, for the better. It would be a great start. I put stock in our future generations, raised with an awareness of environmental issues, to help the evils of industry and over-development dissipate through the coming decades like the eradication of an awfully debilitating disease. Your words and theories contribute to that resistance. We can do this.
…says me at 13.
His two-tone mullet had my tween heart a flutter and my VHS’s of his matches were my most coveted items (maybe because they faced constant over-dubbing fears from my brothers’ Royal Rumbles and Wrestlemanias and my sister’s Days of Our Lives). Watching his tearful goodbye at the US Open a few days ago I felt my internal tween officially retire, as well. So here’s to my 16 years with Agassi and my ascent into thirty-somethingness.
Joey is here for his company’s annual sales conference, schmoozing and boozing with the various grey haired white men who run the division he works for. In his absence I have my fair share of time to devote to adjusting to this new semester and organizing the homestead at root level, particularly the innards of the storage closet. I have longed to tackle the storage closet with its mishmash of cuspidated cardboard and dust bunny droppings but this more rigorous physical form of Tetris ranks low in comparison to the clank of the Yahtzee dice (our latest competitive obsession). So I tackled the task solo, making more of a ruckus than Ralphie Parker‘s dad in his basement, boxing the pets within forts of bric and brac and unearthing some fine frocks, feathers and their accompanying waffs of mildew. The contents were divvied into one of the following piles: clothes to be donated, clothes to be washed/reshelved, papers to be filed, papers to be shredded, papers to be recycled and mementos to be archived in appropriate albums. Within the methodical structure of this organization was a therapeutic release, necessary to counterbalance the secondhand stress of the bipolar bedlam that has hijacked my sister’s mind and body for the last 5 months… dragging her up and down the Prime Meridian. I have once felt that fine line between temperament and disorder and revelled in its distinguishment. So, cleaning the closet out keeps me sane.
Every once and a while I get a strong craving for a 3 Muskateers bar. As a diligent vegan of about 10 years now these occasions have been my only real challenge. Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t suppress my food-related desires. If something is not vegan then I don’t really want to eat it. It is not a battle of the will or a struggle at every meal. I eat well and a lot but better; having an interest and a knowledge base in nutrition makes it easy to. But if I do want to eat something animal-derived, like the 3-4 times a year I give in to the whipped nougat of the 3 Muskateers, then I do eat it. I take my body’s requests seriously and trust that there is a physiological need behind my hankering.
But what is it about this particular candy bar? The Hare Krishnas say here that my beloved candy bar not only contains dairy (lactose, skim milk, milk fat) and egg whites, but “un-bonafide” gelatin and beef additives. Not to mention that their maker (Mars, Inc.) fights against the “fair trade” labeling and employs child labor and they donate to Republican Political Action Committees (c/o my new work time killer bookmark, what’s up UPS?). Mmmmm, political action committees…..
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