Single-Use Plastic

I've only got three full days left on my two-week holiday. If I were on schedule, I'd be just beginning to feel the deadening chill of reality creeping in around the edges, out where the lifeblood of hope is drawn from my existential corpus as I'm sucked back toward the spinning orbit of routine that is destined to warp time into a meaningless blurry smear on the other edge of which is my inevitable death. But I'm getting to sleep in a lot more than normal!

If you're curious how it's going, I will say it's 9 pm and I'm just now getting around to doing my regularly expected writing obligation. I'd love to say it's because I was busy doing something that maximizes my relaxation/rejuvenation and also enriches me as a human, socially or experientially. But really I've just been successfully procrastinating about this voluntary thing that I actually don't mind doing. The best signal that I was living my fully best life would be a tossed off post some time Friday that I had to fit in because I was out all day Thursday bungee jumping off a hang glider or whatever. Today I ate three homemade chocolate chip cookies. The same level of excitement, but less logistically onerous, in all the ways--time, travel, equipment, etc.

I'll be honest, I haven't accomplished much in my time off, but I feel like I'm finally beginning the win the fight against my Americanism where I can recognize that not producing anything in any given block of time can be entirely the point. Surveys over and over again show that Americans are the worst of all the industrialized world at taking time off, which we always spin as "look at how hard working we are," but to me has increasingly been more and more a signal of a total social and cultural capture by corporate industrial interests. And the older I get, I have to say I'm getting more and more into my anti-capitalist era, in defiance of conventional wisdom about how we get more conservative as we age. But I will say I'm doing it in the mode that the hegemonic exploitative economic model approves of, meaning I'm just more willing to be vocal about it, but definitely stopping well short of throwing Molotovs into parked police cars or whatever.

It's not really a revolution when the only measurable action is me saying in writing "I'm willing to be OK with not contributing." The best I can offer in terms of active defiance is I'm very diligent about skipping the ads just as soon as YouTube says I'm allowed to. Take that, The Man.