Finally, some downtime. A brief respite. Tea is made and I am in a comfortable chair, so where were we…
While I have been busying around I have been thinking about things and now that I have some time, I will take time to unburden myself.
I’m having one of those ‘what has the world come to’ moments.
I mean apart from all the obvious stuff.
The world stage is a big one and the drama played out upon is always makes the most of it. I’m leaving that alone, for now, I have tuned in to some other more mundane oddities, though not catastrophic or life-threatening, still managed to catch my eye.
I must admit to being somewhat stunned that an Instagram ‘personality’ was selling her bathwater at 24 pounds a jar. The 19-year-old managed to sell 500 hundred of them before having her account cancelled for totally unrelated reasons.
My question is, who buys this stuff? Seriously. Bathwater!
There’s a young woman, a musician, that apparently sells her used underwear to bidders on the internet! Why would anyone do that, let alone buy that? Because they can, I suppose, is the only answer. Wouldn’t you find it creepy that someone has a pair of your knickers and is what, sniffing them to get off? Wouldn’t you think you might be engaging a potential stalker?
In a world, still so heavily laden with poverty, this kind of stuff it kind of galls me. It’s like online games – yes I do dabble now and then in order to be able to breach the generation gap with my nieces and nephews. The amount of money charged for nominally ‘free’ games is astronomical. I play as long as I can without spending a buck, and it’s not much fun. You get your arse kicked repeatedly and it is easy to see how the pressure builds to start spending up to modify your ‘skins’… But what do you actually buy? An algorithm that only makes more imperative to spend more money. What is that teaching our children?
Over the years I have been bitten by the collector bugs many times. As a child, there were bubble gum cards and comics. Toy soldiers and models were the objects of desire my saved pocket money did little in the way of satisfying my lust. But they were things I could hold. Things to swap among friends or to build and paint and find some kind of satisfaction in a job (not always) well done. Things have changed so much.
This morning I was folding and putting away the washing. I picked up a pair of jeans, stretch denim, ‘pre-shrunk’ but still somehow shapeless and suddenly remembered my mother. She used to tell me of the simple joys of buying a pair of jeans when she was a teenager, putting them on and then heading off to the local swimming hole (she was a country girl) and jumping into the water with her jeans on and then sunbaking on a warm flat rock so her jeans would dry out and shrink to her exact body shape. Imagine just having the time to do that these days! All the teenagers did it. I did it, though not on a flat rock by a swimming hole.
I suppose that was looked upon as an indulgence by her parents but it is nothing compared to the indulgences of today. We squander resources on just about every level. The message brought home to me by a rather strict diet is an example of this. I eat only what I need. There are no leftovers, no excesses. I do get hungry, but I enjoy what I eat that much much more because of it. I have cut drinking down to a mere 4 standard drinks per week. Do I miss it? Nowhere near as much as I thought I would, and I feel so much better for it. Less weight takes the pressure off my back so there’s a win right there. My metabolism is more effective so the medications are far more effective and if I keep going at this rate I will be able to reduce them as well. My mind is more clear and I am inclined to more exercise because I have the energy for it.
Is part of today’s lifestyle excess a product of too many products? I have never known a time of more disposable commodities and in the case of the online gaming, commodities that in essence, don’t exist at all in any physical sense. For example, what kind of society buys designer frames for a pair of glasses that could feed a villager in Kenya for years? Okay, designer stuff looks cool, Joey and I both like it, but we buy it second hand in op shops, or online for next to nothing – you can do that if you know your onions. But people earn their money and ‘no-one can tell me how to spend it’ is the law.
It all comes down to respect or lack of it. What happened to respect? I saw a thing on youtube, young people going into supermarkets in the Americas and opening up tubs of ice-cream, licking it, then putting it back in the freezer. Opening bottles of mouthwash, gargling it, then spitting t back into the bottle and resealing it and then placing it back on the shelf. It became a thing to video yourself doing it then posting online. It is disgusting and criminal. How did we get to this? Did the thought that they might be consuming some else’s saliva not occur to them?
Why aren’t we taught to respect people and property any more?
When I was a teenager I raged against the older generation, it is part of life’s cycle, to question the wisdom of those that went before. I remember the first time I dared to not stand when God Save The Queen in a cinema. The scathing looks I got… but I would never have tainted or tampered with food produce.
I went through the ‘why should I have to work’ phase before reality came knocking at my door. I took the dole for a while.
Even so, through most of my musical career I have had to work in order to survive. Labouring and what not. No-one held a gun to my head and said, be a musician or else…
What I am trying to say is that there is a great amount of satisfaction to be found in earning your keep. Contributing.
I did a gig a while go, normally very well attended and I get a good fee for it. This one time the crowd was way down for whatever reason. I felt bad, that I had failed in my end of the bargain so I did the unthinkable, I told the promoter I’d take a pay cut on my usual fee. He told me not to be silly, that it was bound to happen sooner or later and that the previously well-attended performances more than enough covered one quiet night. Respect and responsibility serve each other mutually. We all are born into this world with the duty of responsibility. We are responsible for ourselves and our choices. We must learn about the consequence.
When nothing is sacred all that is left is crude and immoral.
I have moved off point, I tend to ramble after periods of intense concentration. It’s my way of unwinding. For the last few weeks I have been seated in my home studio working around the clock on various projects, none of which are truly mine, but I’m happy (mostly) to be part of. Today I get to return to the mundane routine of housework. I like it. Doing household chores. It gives a small but very welcome sense of achievement. Makes the larger tasks a little less daunting. So I guess I am signing off for now.
You can stop reading…..
