Tag Archives: Whitey the Man

Shopping Season

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Thanksgiving week is an odd one. A national holiday tacked onto the tail-end of a work week makes for a disjointed flow at best, when breaking rocks for Whitey.

For those of us punching in on Friday, it’s essential to keep in mind that the day has been hijacked by commerce and consumption. Any business transacted will likely take place between Black Friday bargain hunting.

If you are one of the people cursed to be a retail worker, it’s the start of a month’s worth of madness leading up to the high holiday of shopping and crass commercialism, Christmas. I’m glad that my part-time merry-go-round this year doesn’t include a seasonal stint for a well-known online retailer headquartered in Freeport. I’m not feeling overly-Christmas-y this year, with all its uniquely American decorative flourishes. I’ll be keeping it as simple as can be.

Indeed, I’m opting for as much normalcy as I can latch onto here at the close of 2016. So, I won’t be shopping on Black Friday, and it’s highly unlikely that you’ll find me out at the mall or Big Box any other day in December, either.

Bargain-hunting on Black Friday

Bargain-hunting on Black Friday

Stepping Back From Collapse

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A few weeks ago, I stopped over at Aunt Tomato’s for a cup of tea and a treat involving cake and ice cream. I refrained from sweeping crumbs on the floor. AT says that the “coffee pot’s always on.” Those aren’t just words—she means it and I’m enjoying having her only 6 miles away, across the river, instead of living in a neighboring state.

AT and I have been going round and round about what we refer to as “collapse.” If you aren’t a reader of blogs by James Kunstler, Morris Berman, and John Michael Greer, I’ll excuse you now, as this may or may not make much sense to you. However, if you’ll hang with me for a few more paragraphs, I think it might start hitting home with some of you, even if you’re not well-versed in the collapse industrial complex. Some of you might connect with my premise that social media and all its attendant promises are as filled with rocks as Charlie Brown’s Halloween bag. More on that in a little bit.

AT surprised me a bit two weeks ago when she told me that while she knows that working for Whitey the Man for enough shekels to keep a roof over her head can be frustrating and sometimes damn near impossible to deal with, overall, she’s happy with the things that Whitey allows her to have with the scraps he offers from his table. That’s American capitalism 101, really. She’s also not going to try to single-handedly save the world, either. Preach it sista!

On this particular day, I threw out a “what if” scenario, given our history of talking about men in tinfoil hats that implied that perhaps everything collapse-centric was designed to get us all to give up and stop enjoying the beauty in life, and the attendant joys that life lived on this side of paradise has to offer. I could tell that she was seriously pondering what I was offering up.

Collapse is more than the zombie apocalypse.

Collapse is more than the zombie-apocalypse.

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