A psychotic break?
It is with all due gravity that I must announce that the man formally known as ‘mouse appears to have suffered some sort of psychotic break. He awoke Saturday morning after eight hours of comfortable sleep. Sometime during the night his ability to take life in modern American society in the year 2006 completely disappeared.
Last seen he was walking about chuckling gently at folks being walked by their designer dogs. He almost fell down laughing at the sight of two people earnestly negotiating over who would next be owned by an ugly, surly, stinking mechanical contraption made by the Bavarian Motor Works. Strangely the man who was receiving his freedom also received a stack of little green bills, which had he any sense at all, he would have thrown away, but which he instead petted with affection.
Continuing his walk he observed several people who had allowed small appliances to attach themselves to their ears. Apparently affected by advertising images, insecurity or lack of creativity, these people talked constantly. Rarely listening. Never being alone with their thoughts.
And on an on he wandered, lost in a crazy, alien, mixed-up landscape.
While we suspect that by Monday morning, when the crush of the workaday world may well re-exert its proper somnabulatory effect, it is possible that ‘mouse may be a lost cause. Worse yet, he may be developing into a dangerous revolutionary.
The new country will be built upon the backs and imaginations of the psychotically broken. Walk on….
Posted by Keith on 09/16 at 09:33 AMLet me tell you a little something about taking life in modern American society seriously. Yesterday I skipped my regular farmer’s market run because I’m attending a lot of knitting-related events this weekend (a booksigning, a festival, another booksigning, etc.). At last night’s booksigning, a group of women and I were chatting about All Known World Subjects, as knitters tend to do when they cluster, and at one point we were speaking about the E. coli outbreak in packaged fresh spinach. I said that while I tried to never be a snob about other people’s choices, sometimes other people wouldn’t hesitate to judge mine, and that I’d lost count of how many times someone has said to me, “Why don’t you just buy the salad mix/spinach mix/cut vegetables in bags? It’s so convenient! Why would you want to spend all that time cutting stuff up for something that you’re going to eat in minutes? It’s a no-brainer!” I said that sometimes what seems to be a no-brainer often is a more complex issue, and that buying one’s spinach at a farmer’s market, from small-scale local farmers, who do nothing to their spinach but pick it, store it in crates that are only used for that purpose, drive to New York and put those crates on tables is not a question of snobbery—that sometimes it just makes plain sense.
One of the other women replied, “I was actually at that market at the end of the day. There was a lot of spinach left over.”
I was so surprised by this that I asked her to repeat it.
Apparently we have now arrived at a place in modern American life where people don’t have the energy, patience or wherewithal to consider root causes. The fact that the contaminated spinach was traced to a single processor, a large facility that processes crops from all over the country and sells them all over the country, and that there’s a big difference between that and a crop of spinach that is grown in the black dirt of Goshen, NY, less than 200 miles from New York City, by a farmer whose brain you can actually pick about growing methods and the whole organic-vs.-integrated-pest-management issue, apparently was lost on people. All they heard was “don’t eat fresh spinach!” and, aided by sloppy, goofy-assed media coverage, thus did they follow.
‘mouse, honey, what you had wasn’t a psychotic break. It was a vision. Viva la revolucion, baby.
Posted by Bakerina on 09/17 at 07:29 AM
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