To Eat and Be Filled

I approached my recent vacation with a little bit of anxiety about food. The last few decades of my life have been marked by oscillating cycles of weight gain and loss, of being fit for a while, and then having the mass slowly return on a rising tide of IPAs and ice cream.

Going to the beach isn’t exactly the best place to go midway through an effort to constrain one’s once again increasing girth. One might think that being vegetarian would help, but let me assure you that it does not.

Sure, I’m eating a veggie burger, but it’s hard to feel that vegetarian virtue when I’m getting it with a fried egg, fried mushrooms, cheese, and a side of fries the size of the average rabbit.

I’m back to pushing myself to exercise more, which is good for me, and paying more attention to what I eat, mapping out my daily calorie counts against the medically determined expectation for what a man of my height and age needs. In kilocalories, or what we just call calories, that’s around 2,450 a day to maintain life.

The average Spaniard takes in around 2,600 calories a day. The average Japanese, 2,100. The average American? 3,700.  We eat thirty percent more than we need.  And it shows.

Seventy-four percent of the U.S. population is technically overweight. The diet and weight loss industry in this country is a $135 billion dollar enterprise, one that was recently upended by the arrival of GLP-1, which is on track to hit 65 billion in sales this year, with nearly 12% of the population of the United States currently using Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 agonists to constrain and suppress appetite. It’s clearly something that I’m not alone in struggling with. We consume too much, and exercise too little, and when you’re surrounded by an endless groaning table of synthetic deliciousness, it’s hard not to yield to that siren song.

Here in this country, we clearly have trouble with food, trouble coping with our fear of of absence and the presence of consumerist "abundance."   Rather than taking just what we need, we seem unable to constrain ourselves. Are we fearful we’ll not eat tomorrow? Are we soothing some broader anxiety about our place in the world, or our futures?

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The story of the loaves and the fishes is a simple story about our fears and our food, one retold by all of the Gospels, but it’s got a couple of unusual and noteworthy elements. First, it’s really rather amazingly simple. Like so many of the tales that rise from our recountings of the life of Jesus, it’s visceral, a fundamentally graspable and elemental thing, the stuff of the everyday.

The context of the tale in Matthew is one of mourning. Jesus has received the news that John the Baptist, his cousin and a prophet of the coming of the Kingdom, was murdered by Herod. Jesus needed some time alone, and so sought out a place to be in private for a while, taking a boat to an unnamed location.

But Jesus being Jesus, and the word about him humming about in the world, a crowd gathered.

They wanted to hear this prophet, this teacher, this wonderworker, and perhaps to be healed. Again, Jesus being Jesus, he had compassion on them, and healed and tended to them. The day was growing late, and the disciples, seeing the throngs, were eager to wrap things up and send folks on their way. That, and they were worried, because out there in the wild, there was no way they could ensure everyone got fed. Let’s call it, they said, so’s that folks can find their way to nearby villages.

How can we know they’ve got food? We have a little food, sure, but they might not. They are anxious about the gathering, anxious that hungry crowds might lose sight of their message, anxious that there will not be enough.

Which, Jesus knew, there was.

In the face of their anxiety about what they had, Jesus told them: give it away. Break the bread. Cook the fish. Share it with a blessing.

The start of that miracle was the act of not worrying about it, and sharing graciously.

We who have so much poured out to us, and in whom so much potential lies, we need to trust that sort of miracle. This does not come easily for us, particularly as we’ve acclimatized ourselves to expecting more, more and always more, always hungry, never filled.

Some miracles are just right there, ready to happen, just waiting to be seen and acted upon. The joy of life, of growing and giving and sharing from whatever sweetness we have been given? That’ s the deepest of miracles. But first, we have to be able to see it through the thickets of our anxiety, and the depths of our grasping.

A Little Bit of Butter

Change happens slowly in my house, bit by bit, tiny detail by tiny detail.

For most of my life, for example, I’ve kept butter in the fridge. It was just how it was done. This meant, of course, that the butter was always too hard to spread on anything, but again, that’s just how it was. For a while, we just didn’t get butter at all, replacing it with more processed but lower fat substitutes. But butter’s just better, particularly when it gets consumed in moderation.  That, and butter is packaged in paper and cardboard, where other butterish yellow oil-based products are invariably in little plastic tubs.

Better taste and fewer nanoplastic particles clogging up our neurons seems a fair trade for slightly elevated cholesterol levels...which are apparently mostly genetic anyway.

So butter returned, but it was still hard to spread.

At some point, we started leaving butter out, a half-stick at a time. Butter left out is soft and perfectly spreadable, but needs to be covered if you don’t want it to quickly go rancid. We slapped a bowl over the plate where it sat on the counter, and that sufficed for a few months.  It looked a little awkward, as most kludged solutions do.  At some point it occurred to me...isn't there a word for an object designed to keep butter fresh?  A dish for butter?  Hmmm.  What was that called again?

Which meant a purchase, and I prefer not to buy things, or add new items to the sprawling clutter of our house.  

I mean, it was just a butter dish, but when you’re as cheap as I am, sometimes even a fifteen dollar purchase sometimes takes me a good running start.  I looked at butter dishes.  I hemmed and hawed.  I looked again.  Did we really need it?  Was it really necessary?  I'd think on it, then bail, then think on it, then abandon the latest online shopping cart, which would complain at me from the tabs as I left.  "Wait!  You meant to buy this!" it would cry, before I hit the little x and went back to considering the necessity of such a thing.

Sometimes that's helpful.  How many times have I been tempted to buy a useless object, and chosen not to?  Dozens.  Drones and drone flutes, nifty little home robots and used Mercedes Benz convertibles, all dancing like visions of sugar plums in my ad addled head.  In this internet age, as algorithmically optimized marketing tempts us to purchase our way to daily happiness every single time we go online, having a constitutional resistance to consumption is a useful adaptation.

It's not that I don't hear the siren song of mammon, and yearn to reach for it, but my nature binds me to inaction like Odysseus straining at the mast.  

That said, a butter dish is just a butter dish.

“Dave, just buy a [expletive deleted] butter dish already,” said my long suffering wife after I brought it up to her for about the fourth time.  She knows that sometimes even the littlest and most irrelevant changes don’t come easy as I grow more curmudgeonly in middle age.  

Eventually, I found one that seemed both functional and pleasing, a ceramic butter dish shaped like a stick of butter.  I bought it.  It took a minute.

After a couple of months, it felt a little less like an impulse buy.

Just a little.

Information for Consumptive People

After watching the long, long lines of eager shoppers who were completely happy to ditch Thanksgiving/rest/family to line up for hours for bargains, I started looking around for some way to wrap my head around that level of consumer motivation. 

It...um...doesn't seem healthy.

Then I remembered something.  Consumption?  Wasn't consumption once a disease?

And lo and behold, I found this handy-dandy poster.  It reminds us that consumption is an infection, and provides some interesting but somewhat dated suggestions for preventing the spread of consumption in our culture. 

For the current version of that plague, I'm not sure that we've got to worry quite as much about the disposal of spittle.  But some of the suggestions still hold.

Like, say, the reminder that intemperance...that means living out of balance, as I read it...is one major cause of consumption.  Living in dark dwellings, particularly those illuminated only by the light of cable TV or the glow of your laptop?  That's got to be a contributing factor.

I like this recommendation, too:

REMEMBER that FRESH AIR and SUNSHINE are the greatest enemies of consumption and will often cure it when not too far advanced.

That would get you away from the ads and the market propaganda for a while.  

You know, I think that just might work. Assuming we're not all too far gone.

Black Thursday

As we count down the days to Getmas, the biggest festival day of consumer engorgement in America's ritual year is approaching.  That day, of course, is Black Friday.  It's the day set aside for shopping, when most Americans are available to get out there and buy, buy, buy.

If you're working retail, Black Friday is the day you hope to hit profitability for the year.  It's the day when the shoppers come out in droves, and so, well, it's a work day for many, many Americans.

Given how important this day is to our economy, the job creators have over the years gradually tweaked it and expanded it a bit.  A few years ago, we were introduced to the idea of Cyber Monday.

Cyber Monday is that day three days after Black Friday when agoraphobes and those of us who get the heebie jeebies at the very thought of being trapped in traffic in the mall parking lot can all do our shopping online.

This year, we've seen two new spins from the minds of those who are most concerned about making jobs.  There's "Small Business Saturday," when we're supposed to go shopping at small local businesses with whatever money we have left after hitting the Big Boxes on Black Friday.

And then, of course, there's tomorrow.  It's Black Thursday!  Yes, Black Thursday.

Tomorrow is the day right before Black Friday, when most Americans are given a pre-Black Friday vacation day to prepare themselves for shopping.  It's been neglected as a day when consumers could be doing their consuming, and that needs to change.

Yes, I know, this was the day we were supposed to be making lists and reviewing the catalogs that make up 95% of our mail.  But honestly, American shoppers have been wasting this time allocated for Black Friday preparation.

Instead, they've been just sitting around pointlessly at home arguing with their families, eating too much to compensate, and then zoning out unproductively in front of their completely inadequate 42 inch television.   They're often so wacked out on triptophan that they're not even awake to see the ads so carefully placed in the game.   Because of this, we're totally wasting their potential as the engines of our economic recovery.  This year, many of our retail giants have noticed this glaring omission, and are doing what they can to correct it.

Best Buy, Target, and Macys are all bumping their Black Friday start times right up against the border of Black Thursday.   They'll be opening their doors at midnight on Black Thursday, for the shopping convenience of every American.

Walmart, which always has the interests of consumers at heart, will be opening up at 10:00 PM on Black Thursday.   The official announcement from Walmart is:

By sharing our Black Friday specials earlier than ever, we hope to make buying decisions easier for parents working hard to give their families the Christmas they deserve.

Not to be outdone, ToysRUs will be opening at 9:00 PM on Black Thursday.


Of course, some people have whined about this.  You always have some whiners, who are just lazy and unaware of how generous and beneficent our job creators are.  They even got a petition going, which, fortunately, does not have to be paid any attention.   It'll be drowned in the endless sea of catalogs and Kardashian coverage.

So remember, my fellow consumers:  This year, forget about that wasteful, pointless time with your families.  Set aside that unAmerican failure to bump out against the backstops of the credit you've been extended.   Be in touch with the knowledge that your children and your spouse and your friends will not love you unless their market-driven expectations are met.  Get out of your house, put your nose to the shopping grindstone, and do what you've been told to do.

For that, the job creators will be truly thankful.

A Very Starbucks Christmas

Last night, as I chugged a thousand words closer to the manuscript I'm currently working on, I did so whilst ensconced in one of the thirty-seven Starbucks within a five mile radius of my home.  I'm there regularly for a few hours on Tuesdays, while my little guy rocks out at the School of Rock for a three hour band practice.

This last week, it being a whole week before Thanksgiving, Starbucks did its Christmas morph, going from being pumpkin-orange and Fallish to being full-throttle red and white Lil' Baby Jesus cheer. Yeah, it's not Thanksgiving yet, but given the failure of the Salted Mocha Caramel Turkeychino last year, I guess the guys at corporate just assume that they may as well go with Christmas.

Take note, O ye who fret about the War on Christmas: there was plenty of Christmas on display at Starbucks.  It's the Christmas Blend, not the Holiday Blend, so our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ may be honored by the "signature blend of aged Sumatran coffee and other Asia/Pacific and Latin American beans" that most fully gives Him the Glory.

The background music piped in wasn't just Jingle Bells and other unacceptably pagan accretions.  It included indy-lite palatable versions of the Little Drummer Boy, and then a full on version of Silent Night.  As the sound system cooed about the Holy Infant So Tender and Mild, I found myself wondering why it was bugging me so.

The rendition wasn't a bad one, but Silent Night is a sacred song, one that evokes candlelight and gentle reverence.  As marketplace muzak, it felt misused.  Desacralized.

The three twenty-something baristas working there seemed to be struggling a bit with the music, too, although for a totally different reason.  One commented to another that he wasn't sure he could live with hearing this music, over and over again, for the next two months.

I chimed in, asking how long they'd been playing it, and asking if they could survive another month of it.  Another barista responded that it was going to go longer, out 'till mid-January, to squeeze every last drop of Christmas out of the season.  He groaned.  It was clear that they'd be totally sick of all of these songs by the time they were finally given permission not to play them any more.

Twenty minutes later, as I was the only patron in the store, the assistant manager asked me if I'd mind if they changed it over to blues for a bit.

Whatever's going to keep you sane, I replied.

So blues it was.

I don't think Jesus minded the switch.

The Enemy of Capitalism

With the arrival of the new iPhone, I find myself musing about whether or not I should get one. Yeah, it's got a better screen. And two cameras. And video chat, albeit only iPhone to iPhone and only on WiFi. It's pretty cool.

On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with my current iPhone. Which is also my third iPhone, after my first had a cybernetic aneurysm and my second picked a fight with the tile floor in my kitchen. I really and truly don't need anything other than the phone I have. I find myself thinking that way about a whole bunch of the objects I use.

My eight-year old Honda minivan, for example. It's got around 90,000 miles on the clock. It's got a few dings in it. But it still fits our family plus three. It still carries around a crazy amount of stuff. It's not as efficient as I'd like, but it's just as practical today as it was back in 2002 when it rolled off a factory line in Ohio. It was wonderfully designed and engineered, and I will, after cleaning and vacuuming it out, sometimes just marvel at what an amazing job folks did creating something so useful. It's also comfortable, riding smoother and quieter than the shiniest new Coupe DeVille that ever sat on a dealer's lot when I was a kid. I have no need for anything better.

Then there's my motorcycle. It's ten years old. It's got about 38,000 miles on it, which is a whole bunch for a sportbike. It is, shall we say, "cosmetically imperfect," at least as much so as the guy who rides it. It's reaching the point where it can be accurately described as a ratbike. In a brief fit of madness earlier this year, I thought I might be rid of it. But then I rode it again, on a beautiful Spring day. As air snarled through the intake, and the bike sprang forward, I realized that in every way, it meets my motorized two-wheeled transportation needs. I do not need to replace it. More importantly, I have no desire to replace it.

Our house? Much the same. I am content with it. While there are always things that need to be replaced, and things that can be improved upon, I find that with most of the things in my life, I am content with what I have so long as it works.

I fear that might make me dangerous. Lingering contentment, a pervasive sense of being at peace, and quiet, lasting happiness are the enemies of global capitalism.

Mystic Bling

Another of the ways that mysticism tends to get spun in our consumption-addled culture is as a means to the acquisition of more stuff.

Why should the mystic walk barefoot up the mountain, when they could instead float...on the buttery smooth suspension of their eco-friendly Lexus RX450h, their holy tushie coddled warm against the heated leather seats, as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan serenades them through the astounding 330 watt Mark Levinson 15 speaker 7.1 surround sound system? Ah...such inner peace....

When you're connected to the universe in profound and mysterious ways, why shouldn't those connections result in the universe serving up some schweet, schweet schwag? After all, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And if you know the Creator of the Universe on an existential level, then why shouldn't you leverage your connectness, making Oneness with Being serve up some Oneness with Bling?

This approach to "mystic" faith can be found everywhere. It seems to have almost completely hijacked Kabbalah in the popular imagination, as folks traipse about imagining that the little red threads they wear somehow connect them with a future McMansion, or at a bare minimum will allow them to download Madonna's music for free.

This is, to use a delightfully archaic word, balderdash.

Though mysticism is earthy and practical and woven into the fabric of being, possessiveness is utterly alien to any true mystic. The desire to acquire is meaningless to those who yearn most deeply for God. As George MacD puts it:

The man who for consciousness of well-being depends on anything but life, the life essential, is a slave...

and:

But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.

and, here sounding remarkably like a Scottish mystic Yoda:

If it be things that slay you, what matter whether things you have, or things you have not?

The mystic renounces desire for power in all of its forms, be it economic or coercive. They simply cease to seem meaningful. The unsatisfied, ever-empty hunger of the consumer is unknown and unwanted. That doesn't mean living a joyless, stale, or austere life. It simply means a different way of standing in relation to creation, one that is far richer and more abundant. As MacDonald puts it:

He who has God, has all things, after the fashion in which He who made them has them.

Next to the touch of a breeze, or the smell of the honeysuckle, or the laughter of your children, or the bright moon on a clear Spring evening, the cloying cornucopia of consumerism seems a rather empty nothing.