Feed all the Kangaroos...and Run!

Who remembers the Steely Dan song "Black Friday"? There's some reference to "nothing to do but feed all the kangaroos"... and "catch the gray men as they dive from the fourteenth floor".

I saw something about it on Facebook, and it reminded me of this cool picture of my niece Jenny on a trip to Australia. Jenny is now 14 going on 35, and look out world, she is Towanda! She's going to take over the world, which, believe me, would be a good thing. She really ought to be running for President. She does have some political experience in student government already- probably makes her more qualified than quite a few of those candidates!

I worked on Black Friday. I like the feeling of doing the opposite- making money and keeping it in my own pocket instead of spending it on that day like everybody else.

Look out, here comes another rant.

For me, Black Friday is buy nothing day. Actually it's buy as little as possible season, as far as I'm concerned. It's my personal boycott of the whole Christmas shopping season. There's something nauseating about going into any retail store, even to buy groceries, and hearing Christmas music, first of all. And it lasts for over a month, sometimes the onslaught starts after Halloween! After I've heard my first Christmas tune, I'm over it. Change it back to something, anything, please! I wish we could limit the Christmas music to one week- just the week leading up the the actual holiday.

This weekend's papers were HUGE, thick, heavy things- our actual local paper is only a few pages long with four short sections, but the ads made it look like something out of Chicago or LA. How many trees died to make all those ugly full color ads for diabetogenic foods? Do we really need to see pictures of bags of Cheetos on sale? Or digital cameras and megasized TV screens?

I prefer to work on Christmas. I think of it as my gift to the Christian world. Each year I tell my co-workers, anyone who wants Christmas off can talk to me. I'm happy to hide out from the mobs by working.

I'm just so tired of the commercialization and money grabbing, the shameless and mindless consumption of all this plasticized crap. To me, it might as well be porn. It is sleazy.

I cannot understand what is worth pepper spraying or shooting other people over it, or even waking up to stand in line at 4 am to buy some thing that you or anyone else certainly can live without. Personally, I'd rather sleep in, and walk to anywhere I need to go instead of buying another tank of gas. If I can't carry it home in my two hands, it isn't worth buying.

We have an election year coming up, and I'm really tempted to make up my own bumper sticker this time: Kick 'em all out. No incumbents in 2012. Actually, I will vote for Obama, because I don't see alternative candidates who would improve things, but I'm thoroughly disgusted with the state of our government and the way things work against most of the citizens of this country. I can't stand to pay attention, but I can't afford not to. It's gotten so bad that no one can afford to ignore the state of things. We need a control-alt-delete button for our political, legal, and economic systems. Reset, reboot, and start over.

So my goal for this coming year? Eradicate apathy. People have got to quit being apathetic. They have to stop burying themselves in THINGS and THINGS and THINGS they see on TV, and their cell phones, and their text messages, and all the little distractions that make it so convenient to spend money and keep the corporate world ripping all the ordinary citizens off during their willful somnolence.

I wrapped up my buy nothing weekend this morning with a blazing fast-for me- ten mile run on the hills at Horsetooth Reservoir. The wind finally died down and it was a perfectly clear, late fall morning. There's no ice on the water yet. I felt strong the whole way, especially running the uphills and pushing through over the tops, like I never missed any training at all. Awesome.

Quit buying, and keep running.

photo credit: Nathan Nitzky