I grew into dirty hippiedom (I mostly got over it, so relax) at the hands of, among other influences, The Samples.  They have a song (don’t ask me which: like all dirty hippies, formerly or presently, I’m lax on details) that features the lyrics “take what you need, and leave the rest/take what you need, and leave it alone…” Sort of an Amerindian anthem of material efficiency…

I sit in my cozy home, and use my gratuitously useless, conspicuously consumptive lifestyle to wonder: why are there starving children?  Why don’t we help everyone…?   (While doing not a thing to help much of anyone, really, but myself…)

At the same time I’m painfully aware, that without the underpinings of my grosssly excessive lifestyle, there wouldn’t be an option of helping everyone.  I probably wouldn’t even be aware anyone else needed help: I’d be too busy sleeping away another 18-hour day of trying to scratch out simple survival…

I wonder: did any aboriginal Americans protest the decorative use of bones and feathers?  Did they lament the gratuitous and wasteful use of materials?  Is it human nature to convert want to need?  And take the difference for granted?

Or have I just been thinking too much? 

Why can’t I just take it all for granted all the time?  This occasional spark of consciousness is a real thorn in my side…

And this is what I get for talking to my brother the Arch-Capitalist/Pragmatist, drinking too much beer, and reading Frank Herbert. 

If there’s a lesson in there, it probably has chiefly to do with not drinking so much beer…

I’ve been trying to find the golden middle in my caffeine consumption.  I’ve tried dropping it entirely from my routine, and results are dismal (usually literally).  Too much though, especially accompanied with short sleep, and I’m Buzz Happy Pants…until I land with a resounding *crash!*  Then I’m back to dismal.

So I’ve been trying tea.  Just one cup in the morning, with a dollop of honey and topped with milk.  It’s nummy.  Not sure how much (or how little) it’s doing for my mood and my energy, but it’s not a bad way to start the day.  Warm, comfy, goodness *slurp!*

I used up the last of my Lipton Green Tea bags a couple days back, so I broke into my Celestial Seasonings Box of Green.  I think I maybe tripped into some Technical Tea.  Not just tea, in fact, but an Antioxidant Supplement.  Huh.  And not just tea, in fact, but also eleuthero (root), alfalfa (leaf), and stevia (leaf).  Ummm…isn’t alfalfa just…hay?  And why is it in my tea?  Me and Google will be spending some quality time together…eventually.

But for now I’ll trust in CS not to poison me, or jack me up on sativia, or something equally diabolical.   But next time I suspect I’ll look for tea that just has tea in it’s teabag.  Arcane potions make me nervous…

Actually there was no tap dancing.  But the toes are of steel.  Why doesn’t anyone ever want to roshambo me for it?

Tromped around the neighborhood in my new Timberland PRO (they’re really in favor of something…) work boots.  I think they’ll be okay.  Not great, and they won’t last forever, but they’ll do for at least a year.  If they turn out to be total dogs I can send then them back to the factory within the first thirty days and get a refund.  But if me and the boots can last at the warehouse for a year, I think I’ll treat myself to a pair of Redwings.  But for now I’ll make do with my Timberlands. 

They’re about as comfy as can be expected of new boots.  Which is to say: not really all that comfy at all.  I’ll have to play around with the insoles.  I always put an extra pair in pretty much every pair of shoes I own (including my mocassins!) so I’ve got some options.  It’s always a game, finding the right level of cushiness, without packing the shoe so full there’s not enough room for extraneous things like feet…

I’m not thrilled with the lacing.  It’s eyelets all the way up.  I like the top two or three to be hooks, so I can get the ankle nice and snug.  I’m having to lace-up hockey style: a full wrap around the ankle before the knot.  So I had to replace the factory laces with longer ones.  Which I probably would have done anyway: they’re skinny little things.  When did laces become so anemic?  I bought a couple different length replacements, and they’re not a whole lot better.  The longer, flat pair is particularly skinny, almost sateen.  Kinda sexy, and would go great in a corset, but not so good for boots…

And purely aesthetic, but I dyed the brown part of the uppers black.  The toe and the heel are made of a leather that’s supposed to be more scuff resistant.  Looks almost like tarpaper, or a shingle.  But the rest of the upper was brown.  Ummm…no, thanks, I don’t much care for saddle shoes.  I mean, how do you know what color belt to wear for crying out loud…?

So, yeah, I was a bit disappointed in them, like I am with most everything, so I modded them up, like I do with most everything.  I’d probably be thoroughly disappointed if I ever bought anything that didn’t need ‘improving’.  How would I make it mine?

I’ve been trying to stay real honest with myself lately about my wants and needs.  And recognizing when either of them is already met.  A big part of that is pure economics: I can’t afford to indulge all my whims.  But mostly it’s…something else.  Not spiritual really, because I’m not.  But something like that.  Secular spirituality, maybe.

I’m gearing up, literally and figuratively, for a new job.  I needed steel toed boots.   So I went out and bought them, because you can’t really make do by duct-taping tin cans to your toes.  I also wanted to buy a new set of pants and shirts.  Not to have stylin’ new togs, but because I’ve been spoiled by the uniform at my old job.  I love wearing a uniform.  I don’t have to spend anytime thinking about what I’m going to wear to work.  So I was inclined to recreate that for the new job.  But even shopping on the cheap, I did the math, and I’d be spending at least a hundred bucks on clothes.  To make my life marginally more convenient.  Not a huge investment, but I had to stop and ask myself if I really needed to make it.  I mulled it over, and decided I could manage with what I’ve already got for now. 

My grandfather was a child of the Depression.  So every penny counted to him.  He liked to tell us, “Use it up, wear it out. Make it last, or do without.”  The pre-environmental movement “reduce, reuse, recycle.” 

I’m pretty good about my three R’s.  I’ve got a pait of boots I’ve been using since ‘98.  They’ve been intensely worn. The leather is still basically good.  Beat to hell and back, scuffed, paint spattered, sure, but still sound.  The soles are shot: most of the lugs are worn flat (some are just plain missing), and there’s a split all the way across the forefoot of one boot.   But I’m loathe to throw them out.   With a new sole they’d be good shoes again.  But it’d cost more to resole them than it would to replace them.  And somebody somewhere could probably use them just as they are.  But I don’t know how to get them to that person. 

So I’ll hold on to them, and wear them out some more.  They’ll keep company with the other three or four pair of shoes I have that I can’t bear to get rid.   My lawn-mowing, snow-shoveling, gutter cleaning shoes.  The shoes that all have a little life left in them.  The shoes I make last even though I don’t really need to.  The shoes that remind me that even at the low end of the American economic ladder, I still have it pretty good.  Very good, actually.

The shoes that keep me grounded.

Put the shovel down, Bob. Put the shovel down.

We’ve been dropping rocks down the hole every day or two.  We’re up to a 6 second delay before Bob yells, “Ow! Quit it…”

“Exactly, Bob,” we yell back.  “Exactly.”

Well, I don’t know, maybe you can.  Y’know if you eat tacos made out of Tums…

But generally speaking, when you’ve dug yourself a hole, and you’re in over your head, you need to stop digging.  Seriously, put the shovel down.  If you got yourself into a bad situation through a particular set of behavior, you’re probably not going to get yourself out of it by continuing to repeat that same behavior.  

Which, of course, is easy to say, but not always so easy to do.  I get a little bit bonkers when I misplace something.  If I’m feeling relaxed and groovy I can stop and reflect and remember where I had it last and sure enough, there it is.  But if I’m under stress (like, say, looking for my keys when I need to have left five minutes ago…) or otherwise distracted (like say, not having gotten enough sleep for three days running…) the situation is gonna get stupid.  Fast.

I start out okay.  I look where I think the widget in question ought to be.  Not there.   So I move on to the next most likely place it’d be.  Not there either.  And on down the line, usually four or five steps deep.  And still no widget.  So clearly the widget is somewhere I haven’t looked.  But I’m too tired, or stressed out, or whatever to see that simple and obvious truth.  So I go back to location one, where I invariably fail again to find my widget.  So on to location two, still no widget, and on down the line.

By this time I’m angry.  What is obvious to me is not that the widget is somewhere I’m not looking, but that the widget is evading me.  It’s gleefully scampering through the house, always a step or two ahead of me.  Or I’ll get paranoid and decide it’s been stolen, or abducted by aliens, or something equally nefarious.  Obviously it’s vanished.  Obviously.

The incredible thing is, regardless of what I believe has happened to it, I’m still stalking from room to room, getting angrier, and still looking for the widget in precisely all the locations I already know that it isn’t.  And at some point I snap.  And give up.  Then I can breathe and think for a second.  And maybe look under the table instead of on top of it.  Or behind the bookcase and not next to it.  And sure enough, there’s the widget.  Miraculously restored to me via alien intervention.  Or something.

So guess who misplaced his pill minder tonight, and found it under the keyboard, and not next to it…

Turns out my friend Bob got nabbed at a roadblock set up during a brown-person sting.  State cops were set up checking for green cards.  Poetic justice: Bob has the hardest time not being a racist fucknut sometimes.

Should have stuck to stealing cookies...

I was exhausted last night (y’know after getting only four or five hours of sleep the night before, I can’t imagine why, but there you are…) and only managed to stay up til three.  But I figure it’s okay: I’ll sleep in plenty late, make up a few hours rest, and be primed for continuing my epic journey towards nocturnality.  Parfait.

Good plan, but utterly wrong.  Just a few minutes past 8:30 *bing!*  “Up and at ‘em!  C’mon, boy, there’s a whole world out there!” 

“Fuck off,” I tell my internal alarm clock, “I don’t need to be up ’til one…” and stuff my head back under my pillow and try to go back to sleep.  And try some more, and keep trying for about an hour before I decide a light doze is the best I’m going to accomplish.  Dammit!

Seriously, what gives?  Up until the past week, I was trying to get up at eight.  Or nine.  Hell, consistently getting up at ten feeling ready to go would have been fine.  But I’ve had to drag myself out of bed for months.  And take an hour or more to boot up.  And now I’m ready for action at dawn.  I call bullshit, hypothalamus.  Stop fucking with me, you aren’t funny.

…if the cops don’t get you first.

So I’ve got this friend, or sort of friend (we’ll call him Bob for simplicity’s sake) who got his license suspended last year on a DUI.  Oops.  So Bob hired me to do a lot of his driving, but he’s been sneaking around town, driving on the sly.  Fairly safe bet as far as the odds go, but man, don’t get caught, right? 

I’m not quite sure how yet, but Bob got caught today.  Oops.  He called me on his cell phone this morning, from the back of a squad car, and let me know I wouldn’t have to pick him up today.  Cool, I can handle that.  But then he calls back a about fifteen minutes later, asking me if I’d drive to his house (he lives about 40 min away) and hang out and come bail him out later this afternoon.  Grrrr.  But yeah, okay.  I mean Bob’s a fuck up in a lot of ways, but not a total fuck up, and he’s still my friend.

So I’m sitting here, waiting.  And waiting.  And waiting.  And not a peep from Bob.  And I’m supposed to be at work in ten minutes and I was only able to get hold of someone at the warehouse about five minutes ago to tell them I’ll be late (and, I’m sorry, no, I don’t know how late…).   I’m about fed up and ready to leave his ass in jail.  It won’t actually teach him anything, but it’d serve him right on many levels.

*sigh*

I wish I wasn’t so nice sometimes…