Tuesday, October 07, 2003

Wow. It's more than a little disturbing sometimes wondering how search engine algorithms work. Benblog shows up in the top ten for "he wanted to watch me pee" and "strangers watching me pee" in Google, pointing to a blog entry that included a short paragraph about peeing outside on the coldest day in 2003, or that whole winter for that matter, in Missouri. I was thinking tonight on the way home that there is a certain peace that comes with realizing that something that I think will make me happy really won't. It does take the fun out of the pursuit, the machinations, the scripts we all know so well. But that fun isn't happiness, just something that ultimately wastes time, worse even than biding time, squandering time, more precious than some fleeting grasp, some dive into the waters again, after the water has already become much, much too cold. 1:25:41 AM

I think one of the measures of how much you value something, one of the most important measures, if it you value that thing enough that you are willing to go without, sacrifice that thing you desire most, to be able to have more later. As gauche and American as this sounds, I MISS my 24-hour Schnucks, just a few blocks from my house. I so loved being able to shop at one or two in the morning, ride the linoleum Zamboni around with Mr. Circoni while he sang some of his favorite Pucini arias. Life was grand. Sometimes I wouldn't even buy anything, just wander around, the nights all I was looking for was some comfort that the supply lines still ran, that underpaid banana pickers halfway across the world hadn't unfettered themselves from the vagaries of the global cash crop market. Or that Teamsters hadn't banded together with other labor groups across the globe to lay bare the very foundation of Das Kapital. I would breathe in the grocery store air, and that would be enough to fill me, that I wouldn't, not yet, have to face the long hard struggle to live truly cooperatively, for the love of cooperation, for the love of humanity, not some exchange value that our belief in enslaves. 12:46:46 AM