“Love thy label as thyself” ~James Joyce
There I was, again, standing at the kitchen stink — which is painfully low for a tall man of degeneration, but that’s another story . . . lifting the counter height — wasting water & a finger nail to remove poisonous luminescent green ORGANIC labels that are, by design, difficult, if not impossible, to remove unless you are willing to either bruise or even destroy the fruit you’ve just bought. Bought at a premium to get “organic”. (Just forget about organic tomatoes unless you plan to eat them immediately.) Worse, if you leave the labels on & proceed to rinse the fruit, the labels never come off; you have to cut away that part of your purchase & throw it away; all the while remembering, there is no “away” — just use or waste or more waste.
I shop once a week. It’s both time & fuel efficient that way. So I buy a dozen apples once a week, & if, after the label dance, they are perforated, bleeding & bruised the gnats get them, then they rot & are gone before the week is over; so I pay a premium to eat “organic” & then toss it to waste. I refuse to participate. Refuse to add to the refuse, the waste of stupid haste.
But I want to get things organized, remove the labels, rinse the food, put all of the groceries away & get on with my life. Here in Empire I’m supposed to have the right to choose, right? So that’s how I live my life: a noble Roman trying to be responsible with the fruits of empire, knowing that others are suffering & I can’t do much about it except resist overt participation, vote for the lesser of two weevils, make responsible choices, & do my very best to help others at all times knowing that most people are too unconscious to ever understand that another person cared & attempted to help. (In fact, my experience tells me that helping not only goes unnoticed but also tends to cause trouble because I get blamed.) Knowing more. Knowing moron. More on that later. But, knowing that later on, or quite soon truly, it will all change, this empire of desire lacking an umpire to limit the fire, knowing that when the supply chains disintegrate in the acids of climate catastrophe . . .
But until that time comes, I attempt to live my life as a good citizen: reduce my use of fossil fuel, serve wholesome unpoisoned food, & organize my doings so that I can have the time to serve others — or at least take responsible care of myself as I, myself, teeter at the edge of accelerating decrepitude, my Rx for opiates already way off the overdose charts.
So this label bull shit fuss pisses me off. I don’t like wasting my time. I don’t like wasting water. I don’t like scraping label gunk out from under my finger nails later in the afternoon. I don’t like not liking. Etc. I mean, all I want is some fucking peace & a chance to do something useful before I go. I just want peace, calm, sweetness. Sweetness like the taste of a good apple; crisp & firm & tart & sweet. A blessed life of priviledge practiced under the black wing of empire.
So I start to wonder, why do they DO this to their fruit? Well, another fraction of thought & it’s obvious: to solve a problem. OK, but what fucking problem? Detective Montelbano deduces: too many (three) people don’t want to pay the higher price of organic produce, they think they have a right to these apples flown in from Chile by fossil fools. But there is always a higher price. Then I’m wondering how many of Allende’s leftist, unionized supporters were slaughterd in those apple orchards, am I ingesting nutrients from their blood?
Ok, so these evolved entitled eaters of organic only were peeling the labels off — in the fucking store, somehow sneaky no doubt but right there under the security cameras. Brilliance at the best. Like dinsoars in congress. At some point the store realized (maybe those security cams aren’t fake & maybe may be that they really do review those store security videos) that three regulars remove & then swap off the labels before checking out. So, in retaliation, the store pollutes the organic produce with industrial-strength labels & we nudge our collective unconscious horde another centimenter closer to disaster. Dis-aster: dead star-flowers. Everyone, store included, checks-out because there are health-conscious customers entitled to have organic produce without incurring the cost. And of course this must be stopped, no matter what the cost.
Does not compute. Some of those who must eat organic devolve to shopliftiing & have no qualms about poisoning their souls to avoid the higher price of organic. In the process that has evolved, they fuck anyone else who wants to actually pay for organic apples. It’s so simple. You see, there is an industrial solution for everything. Let’s just put WD-40 in the milk to keep the caps from getting stuck. Just in case.
Life in the world’s most exceptional nation means living among exceptional, entitled people. These sorts of people, as well as people like myself who have not taken the time to identify & strangle three culprits right there in the organic isle, have brought us to the edge of extinction. “It’s a priviledge,” she said, wiping the come off her lips as she sat back up in his gleaming BMW. As I’ve heard the privileged say, “Gotta have my organic apple with my soy latte, which comes, I know, in a plasticized cup. And I feel bad about that.”
Uh-huh.
And here we go. There is no “away”. But there is a future of heat & flame & likely ashes, ashes, all fall down. . . & that, my friends, is about as away as this planet can go — though if we remain diligent & steadfast to our economy of scale with labels-as-usual, we may be able to push every earthen thing even further away, to a place well beyond ashes. Our planet, wasted in space. But then, who can stay to say? Prophet of perplexity, as I turn the faucet off, stopping that flow of profitable water, litter-ally embedded with tons of fossil fuels burned to move it from watershed to water faucet, I drift off with corky thoughts of orbiting astronauts stranded on the international space station. What’s in their faucet?
~jwl
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