Amazon, oh Amazon...

I actually don't mind having bought and paid for an Amazon Prime membership. Not much anyway. But an experience I have had today has me rethinking the ethics of certain choices.

So, my partner and I are Seattleites without a car. I do love not owning a car. At one time, I used Flexcar, but it's been bought by someone else, and the rates are very high, and I'm unemployed for three months now, so car rentals are definitely a thing of the past. If I had the money, I'd still use it, though, for sure. It's a great program, even if the new company is bigger and meaner.

Of course, not having a car means we spend a very large part of our days traveling. King County has one of the best (if not the very best) transit system in the country. I know there are some contenders for the top spot out there, but Metro transit, coupled with Sound Transit, Community Transit, and Pierce Transit, means that you can get almost anywhere between Everett, Issaquah, and Tacoma on public transit. That's pretty dog gone impressive. On the other hand, we have to plan for an hour travel time for what would take us twenty minutes to drive at midnight.

Also, carrying a case of sodas, three bags of groceries, and a 35 pound pail of clumping cat litter is absolutely impossible on the bus, so sometimes, several times a month anyway, we get a taxi ride home from somewhere, or have groceries delivered by Safeway or Albertson's for a fee. So when Amazon Fresh started delivering groceries in my neighborhood, from a private warehouse located in Bellevue, I was intrigued. At first I was disappointed to have to buy a 79 dollar Amazon Prime membership to be allowed to take advantage of their services. But the membership DOES have it's advantages outside of being able to use Amazon Fresh.

On top of the free 2-day shipping on all products stocked by Amazon.com, I get 3.99 overnight shipping on each of those same items. With Amazon's good deals from time to time on regularly needed stuff, I figured this was a fine benefit to have available for a year. But the real savings for us is in the Amazon Fresh shipping. Fresh delivers orders for free if they are over 30 bucks. That's a HUGE deal for a family of two. Free shipping is often available from Safeway or Albertson's, but you have to spend anywhere from 75 to 150 dollars to get it, depending on whether they're offering a promotion. I just got a free shipping coupon from safeway in the mail - for an order of 100 dollars or more. That's just an awful lot of food, much of which cannot be fresh or it will go bad before we two use it.

So now we can have fresh fruits and vegetables delivered a few times a week, and as long as we spend at least 30 bucks (which is absolutely no problem these days, let's face it) we don't pay for the shipping. This saves us at least two ten-dollar taxi-rides per month. So you can see how 79 bucks for the Prime membership was still a bargain for us.

But like I said, there's those other benefits, too, right? So yesterday I decided that since Amazon had this really great pie plate available for 5 bucks, and I needed a pie plate today to bake a berry pie, I'd just have them overnight it for 3.99 and for a total of 10 bucks, I get a much nicer pie plate than I could get from the local grocery store where I would spend the same. I could have bussed it to Target, but I figured this was available, and easy, so why not.

Well, today I checked the tracking of my wee little pie plate, and I am concerned about this choice. It got into some sort of transport vehicle in Reno and went to Sparks, Nevada. From there, it flew across the North American continent to freaking Ontario, Canada, where it then took a turn, and flew back across North America to arrive in Seattle this morning, where it has now been put on a truck and is headed my way. Wow. Wow, wow, wow.

What an awful lot of carbon in the air, and fossil fuels we will never have back. And just so I didn't have to walk six blocks each way to the store and back? I'm not convinced this choice is in line with my personal ethics.

So, at this point, I've made the decision to always get something locally if the amazon savings are not very significant. Because I feel guilty about this, even though the details and specifics of the pollution and expenditure of fossil fuels was outside my immediate control. The reality is that it was my choice to place the order, so it's worth weighing these factors in the future when I make a purchasing decision.

Still, the bottom line at this point will have to remain savings. If I can save a ton of money buying from Amazon and getting free 2 day shipping, I'll still have to take advantage of that, because I'm just not personally in a position to finance solutions to our global problems.

No Topic

I saw Brad Pitt's latest (almost) 3 hour spectacle. Interesting ideas. Could have been a 90 minute movie but Pitt loves a slow, pedantic film.

Haven't heard from my biological father since before the corporate wealthfare holiday. We shall see. A couple of caustic emails later and I finally got a reply from him saying he had been working and such, but not making excuses, and promising to stick around. Huzzah!

There's a fantastic Russian guy who opened a Subway a few blocks from my house. Bless his heart. He's so sweet. The walking dead today. He had a baby (or rather, his wife did) on Xmas eve. Whee!

I've never been catholic but now I wear a cross around my neck.

I am sick again.

Winter Solstice Report

It's fucking cold, unseasonably snowy and icy for Seattle, and I'm glad to say that starting tomorrow, we return to more appropriate temperatures and good old cold fucking rain.

For our annual end-of-year splurge, I requested an ounce of the finest marijuana, and some hashish. I got exactly what I asked for.

I also spoke for two and a half hours to my biological father, two whom I have not spoken for a decade, and even then I didn't know him. He left when I was four, letting my mother's new husband adopt me and abuse me. When I was 18, we had a period of a few years trying to get some kind of reconnect going, but once again, he bailed out, afraid, he said. Full of regret. Unable to choose differently in spite of that.

So I moved to Seattle in 1999 and saw him once before I left, but that was the last I had heard from him. I didn't even hear from him when his mother died. Now he's almost sixty and wants to reconnect, which I've agreed to, and look forward to with hopeful anticipation.

It occurs to me now that the only linguistic structure I've ever applied to him effectively was "biological father" and even this was only an explanation to others - it never explained anything to me. It took until this week before I began making the connections between those words and the material realities they represent. Half of me was once, a single, identifiable sperm living in one of his testicles, which traveled through the shaft of his penis and exited, with more than a few others, swimming excitedly until stumbling headlong into one truly monumental case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, for instance.

Fucking.

Crazy.

So you know, whatever. It is a revelatory light that demonstrates the heart of my belief that biological connections (frequently termed family) are worth nothing, and do not guarantee or even necessarily bear the capacity to afford a person the very things we most seem to need and desire from our Real Families. I say this because when afforded the opportunity to create my own family, I have sought out so many values and traits directly opposite those embodied by my two rather cowardly parents. I haven't got a lot of good words for them right now, and there's no need to add to the pile of whining snot on the internets, so I'll stop there for now.

Courage, honesty, ability, honesty, dependability... honesty. These are the qualities embraced by those in my Real Family. Everything demanded of me as a child before I had the opportunity to choose it, because it was completely void in those responsible for my transmogrification.

::sigh:: I've had to make up for these three for a long time. And it's funny how I feel like this one is now trying to catch up to me. I find that annoying. It makes my back hurt. It makes me want to go to sleep.

I made a most delicious beef stew yesterday. And the best polenta I've ever pulled off. Creamy and delicious. With some fresh baked rolls, it was a meal meant for a snowy day spent indoors.

I have a few projects I'm trying to gain traction with:

The Spice Rubric: Confessions of a Culinary Sinner
An in-home water feature that makes a lot of noise for zero dollars
Storycorps.net - especially with my biological father
Finish reading "120 Days of Sodom" and "Ambivalent Zen"
Make meaningful progress on "Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self"
Clean the bathroom

I am tired, and am going to take a nap with my cats.

Video Games - Atari 2600 and beyond

I had Asteroids, Pong, Combat (Tank Plus) and Missile Command. I sort of miss missile command, but I guess that's what SupCom is for.

I miss those days, sometimes. And yet, I don't. I guess what I miss is the opportunities I think I had then, which I think I don't have now. I yearn for them in some kind of nostalgic way, whether they are even real or not. In fact, I probably have way, way more opportunities now, as a 32 year old adult male living in Seattle, than I did then.

Sometimes this sort of thinking makes me want to shoot myself in the head.

On the other hand, I think I'll just smoke a bit more hash and relax.

Thursday Afternoon Digression

We are grasping for a vision.  Collectively, we are aware that we are headed for a cliff, but individually, we have no idea how to turn away.  I think I heard that on a TED talk somewhere.  If you know, let me know, please.  It's a remakably accurate metaphor for the sensation I personally  have while riding the waves of our collective un/consciousness. 

I am a survivor of the largest cult in the world - Organized Christian Religion - and as such, I am rather acutely aware of the betrayal we all are feeling inside.  In our industrial world, we have industrialized everything, including spirit-centered dogmas which have now SO long lost their capacity to act as a container for our inner "otherness" that we find ourselves awash in real depravity.

As human beings we have become rather abruptly aware of our dualistic nature via the container we call consciousness.  The capacity for Knowledge (forbidden fruit and smoked gouda on sliced Truth, anyone?) has been bestowed upon this creature known as Man through the eternal nature of opposites.  We understand everything through opposition - we know what a thing is by what it is not.  The entire process of language learning for a child is a reductive process, beginning with The Everything from which we are all born, and with which infants are still quite intimately familiar, down through layers and layers of words and new understandings of what is and is not, what a thing is because it is not another thing.  

Likewise our personalities are whittled away from their 360 degrees of wholeness, (Bly) down to whatever shred of Truth (if any) remains in their outward confessional known as ego.  It's not wrong, it just is.  But the reclamation of those Truths can become a necessarily pragmatic approach to preventing the aforementioned depravity, to which I will soon be getting.

We are bobbing about in an ever increasing ocean of collective consciousness, and the pool is getting crowded.  We are finding it impossible these days to disavow knowledge of certain horrors that enable some of us to have luxuries like clean water, functioning cities, financial infrastructures, roads, medicine for HIV, Nike's, and on, and on.  

But god damnit people, what is anyone supposed to do?  Give up the fight to have more goodies?  Even in such dour economic times as this, one still yearns for every damn thing.  We may not be able to find a way to buy it - not even with a credit card this year, bitches! - but yeah, sure, I still have all the dreams of material gain and wealth like anybody else in their early 30's.  On the other hand, I know that this isn't what will ultimately make me happy.  I want something a whole hell of a lot bigger and cooler than my own fucking ego-stroking mansion and what-nots to go with it.  Way, way bigger than that.

But!  It is still 2008, Barack Obama is still not yet the POTUS (smooth-transition-assurances from Mr. Bush notwithstanding) and the dying gasps of this capitalist machine have not quite yet been sputtered.  But let me just tell you something, Sam's Club, nobody is fooled by the strains of "The First Noel" coming from a plastic tree on November 3rd.  It's still autumn, I still have a few more hay rides to go before the end of the season, I have not yet enjoyed my final cup of mulled cider.  So I will be DAMNED if I'm going to believe it's the Christmas season damn near a fuck month before Thanksgiving.  

I have planned to enjoy the luxury of allowing a (locally raised, cage-free, organic) turkey (costing a heart-stopping 3.49 a god damn pound) to be slaughtered in my name.  I am going to pick her up next day, and immediately immerse her in a mixture of sea salt, pure organic vermont maple syrup, and water for 24 hours until Thursday morning when I'm going to roast her using the foil wrap method.  This combination of factors will result in the most tender, flavorful, and not just juicy, but WET meat one could ever hope for.  Please, damnit.  Please.  Let me have some peace before ramming it down my throat.  Hell, you're only adding to the consumer paranoia that keeps us pinching those pennies. 

You see, none of this stuff we do every year to ensure good profits for end of fiscals is in any way actually Christian.  Christ would call most of our religious and political leaders Pharisees.  The total lack of spirit-centered activity has us ALL suffering and questioning. 

No longer do we have real authority figures in most parts of our individual lives.  We are also tremendously ill-equipped - as a whole - for really good cognitive processing.  We haven't been taught to think for ourselves, nor to rely on each other for our collective strengths.  There is, really, nowhere to turn.  We know the greed machine doesn't really make us happy.  So what will? 

Well, I believe we need what Jung referred to as a unifying myth.  (Or was it Edinger?) But less mythical and more grounded in reality.  I think that we do have an awareness of the collective creative and productive ability of the human force on this planet.  I think we are becoming more and more aware of it every day.  I think that ultimately, in our deepest heart of hearts, where I believe we are all connected, where we all spring from the same Life Force Energy that allows anything and everything to exist, we want to do well for ourselves and each other, as a whole.  

I don't believe we want to hurt others in order to have more for ourselves.  I don't believe that myth is true.  I believe that we want a future for ourselves, our children, our grandchildren, and the generations of our seed that we shall never personally know or meet, that is built around the abundant and life-giving nature of our very real, natural universe. 

Collectively, we have the power to create some massively beautiful solutions to very modern problems.  Our mass and scale has grown to such epic proportions in such a short period of time that we have begun to lose the ability to sustain our individually epic lives.  Somewhere, in places we don't talk about at parties, we are aware that not every human being on the planet can have a Ferrari, for instance, but that makes us want no less for one of our own.  It seems natural and perfectly acceptable to think that some will have more, while others will have less.  In order to shore up that narrative against the waves of reality surrounding us in the faces of, say, the homeless, we have endeavored to create a narrative about social security, and the welfare of our people.  But even that narrative is also no longer able to withstand the ever-increasing eyes of awareness that continue to open, faster and faster, in that ocean of consciousness.

We also believe, in some rather mostly unmentioned places, that what we do to one, we do to each of us.  We believe that we should do unto others.  (We believe that everyone should have a Ferrari, however infeasible this ostensibly is.)  But we don't mention these beliefs very often, because in order for everyone to truly benefit, we have to be willing to give up (at least some degree of) individual power, fame, and wealth, whether real or imagined.

A real assessment of global resources and ecosystems makes it clear that we are headed for that cliff, but what the fuck are we to do, right?  I believe Barack will offer some guidance in that, as he should.  I also believe that ultimately, our economic and financial systems are more of a joke than anything else, and eventually, we are going to see that The Human Race will rise to the challenge of becoming a unified race, unifying our goals and visions for a sustainable and profitable future.  

We are all people, my friend Orka Veer said to me the other day.  Indeed we are.  And we don't truly want this kind of horror in the world to continue, do we?  We don't want the kind of human rights violations and social injustices that occur daily in China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and other countries to go on, just so that we can buy more cheap gadgets and toys just for ourselves, do we?  I don't. 

I would rather - I would MUCH rather - that we were working together on a global solution to our housing, energy, and food production needs for 20 billion people (not that far away - one generation?) that can be effectuated in such a way as to ensure the ecological sustenance we would all really, really be grateful for.  Let's face it - the apocolypse is only going to come in so far as we bring it on ourselves.  There's no imaginary friend up in the sky gonna turn loco on our asses and wipe us out, locusts and moons turning to blood and shit.  It's just not going to happen.

But we may destroy ourselves by insisting that every one can have every thing, so our individual greed is acceptable.  We only cling to that greed because it gives us an answer to the otherwise meaningless existence we are collectively leading right now.  We will benefit when our meaning in life comes from the unified effort to secure the survival of our planet, all species, and all life.  

That, I daresay, would be the actual embodiment of the tenets of the Right to Life movement.  Not more traditionally Republican shenanigans.

Anyway.  I've got lots more where this came from, so maybe I'll piss somebody new off tomorrow!

Resentment

Resentment owns me, more than anything else. I resent everything.  I resent all kinds of things.  I am a resentful person.  And now, behold, my resentment. 

I resent being mistreated by others.  I resent being mistreated by my family.  I resent being taught to seek authority only from external, and at times, imaginary sources.  I resent being lied to. I resent the people around me.  I resent the world and it's unbelievable stupidity.  I resent you.  I resent this blog.  I resent being here.  I resent my life, and I resent yours moreso.  I resent the existence of anything beautiful.  I resent myself.  

I resent the shit - SHIT - job my parents did raising me.  I resent the molestation of my four year old body by my stepfather.  I resent the denial of that molestation by my biological mother, his wife, to this very day.  I resent being taught such terrible truths about life - that truth is lies, lies are truth, and The Truth doesn't really matter to anyone.  I resent that my life means so little to the bastards responsible for making it be.  I resent waking up and breathing every day.  I resent the pain and suffering I have endured and endure today as a result of so many bad decisions by others.  I resent what my life has been like. 

I resent learning the hard way.  I resent being out of place and out of time.  I resent being different, unacceptable, and unincluded in every group.  I resent being everyone else's /other./  I resent being unaware of the ability or how to fit in.  I resent being myself.  I resent what you think of me.  I resent it being true.  I resent its inaccuracy.  I resent your thinking it.  I resent being thought of in that way.  I resent our mind games.

I resent writing this blog post, and I resent you for reading it.  I resent its being read, and I resent its posting.  

I resent wanting to cry right now.  

I resent this moment unfolding into our next moment together.  I resent it unfolding.  I resent it passing away.  I resent everything.

I want to sleep.

Snowflakes make me want to buy things

Moments ago, I received an email from Amazon.com advertising several items within the email.  The background for the product images is now just a bunch of snowflakes.  I say "now" because I can remember when there used to be things like angels, or shining stars, or christmas trees with ornaments and garland.  

Then, a few years ago, more than a few people became aware of the fact that there is more than just one kind of winter solstice celebration.  In Seattle, the Port Authority took down nine holiday trees, however, rather than honor a Rabbi's request to display a Menorah alongside them.  "No," they said, "zat would require us to include EVERYONE, and ve haven't got ze time for such sings.  Take it down!  No celebrations!  Heil Hitler!"  

Of course, this sparked a lot of controversy, as the WASPs were not sure how to handle being relegated to the status of "equal" to ... you know ... OTHERS.  So, the trees went back up,

once the Rabbi stopped threatening to file a lawsuit over the Menorah-in-absentia.

Now, if the Amazon advert with nothing but a few paltry flakes and a white, heterosexual couple wearing sweaters is to be taken as representative of the larger social and cultural atmosphere surrounding The Holidays, and I would argue it ostensibly is, this holiday shopping season (which I note has begun even before I have bought a Thanksgiving turkey) will be utterly bereft of religious symbology.  

A change I welcome with open arms.  

Of course, I find it interesting that seeing only the snowflakes and happy white heteros automatically makes me want to buy things and wrap them in colorful paper to give to those I love.  

The capitalist marketing machine abides.