September 20, 2007: Styrofoam

I can understand how some people give up: take drugs, abandon society, commit suicide, drink to excess, whatever. It is the mundanity of life that engulfs one's being and threatens to never loosen its grip. Television, shopping malls, keeping up with the Joneses, can lull a person into such a somnambulant state, that before you know it, you are 30, 40, 50 and what have you to show of your life: a house with a huge mortgage, a couple of leased cars, credit card debt, a plethora of plastic objects, too many unwanted clothes, an estranged family, a failed marriage, entitled children, and a part in a society that increasingly just doesn't get it.
We have all forgotten what we were striving for. What was the point again? Oh yeah, to "be happy"- the elusive goal that most think is just one major purchase away- one more self-indulgence and then I will be satiated-and yet, at the end of that cocktail party or check-out line- the feeling is hollow, cold, empty-a styrofoam cup in the parking lot after the fair has left town. And so all that had glittered has been boiled down to its essence- and it ain't pretty-in fact it is so useless and cheap that it skitters over puddles of filth and breaks apart with the slightest of pressure-littering the corners of life with fragments of itself so ubiquitous that soon its presence is acceptable, indeed the norm. And that is what we have become- an empty fairground parking lot- the threshold to a place that promises titillation, excitement, but delivers saturated fat instead.