La Catholique

I don’t know why I watch “Weeds.”

But that’s actually a topic for a different post, why I watch something I can’t stand. 

What is bubbling forth from me right now is a visceral, teeth-gnashing hatred for the theme song, “Little Boxes.”

I grew up in a “Little Boxes” land.  As a teenager and young adult, I had all the requisite contempt for the place where I grew up, the lack of culture, the brain-deadening sameness.

Then I got a job, got debt, got tired, got old and got the fuck over it.

Granted, I still don’t want to live in a Little Box.  But that’s aesthetics, that’s taste, it’s not necessarily values or morality or anything that presumes one way of life is superior or inferior to another. It’s just a different set of choices. 

I mean, sure, my job is often dealing with the kind of people the song Little Boxes is about, and I do get frustrated that so much of my waking life is spent talking to people who have a different lifestyle to mine, one that I can’t really relate to. 

But I at least have the self-awareness to recognize that’s just my own form of tribalism, liking My Kind over The Other, and making the traits of The Other repugnant. 

It doesn’t mean I am right, that God and Jesus and Buddha and everyone else came down with a notarized certificate indicating MY choice of not living in a Little Box is the Ultimate Correct Way and all those who live in Little Boxes are the heathen damned.

They’re just fucking people living their fucking lives.

And my own experience, having grown up in that kind of environment, having lots of friends who grew up in that kind of environment, is that while we did all go “to the university” we did not “all come out the same.”  We’re leading pretty different lives on different continents.  Sure, we have similar privileges based on our class and our education, but even the friends who chose to continue living in Little Boxes country aren’t mindless unthinking drones. 

Are some people in those Boxes mindless unthinking drones?  Sure, as are some of the people in the walk-up apartments in Manhattan or a favela in Brazil.  There will always be people who base most of their choices on conformity, on sticking with what their neighbors and ancestors have chosen.  And there will always be people who want something different.  ALWAYS. 

Little Boxes made of ticky tacky don’t create complacency.  A…what would be the opposite? A mixed-use community, an urban environment, does not innoculate its inhabitants from complacency. 

So the self-satisfied judgment of that song, the way it’s condemning all those people because they “all look just the same” WHILE IT’S JUDGING PEOPLE BASED ON HOW THEY LOOK is just so incredibly aggravating.  Especially since the very first line contains the words “on a hillside.”  You’re not even there! You’re THAT far away and you can tell all this about the hearts and minds of these people.

Their houses might be Little Boxes but you’re the one putting labels on them.

Words that are not onomatopoeic…

…but sort of feel like they are.  Like they make the sound of the essence of the thing they label even if not the sound of the sound of the thing they label

• Chicken (but for the food, not the animal)
• Pencil
• Pickle
• Noodle

I am collecting scrap metal with which to build a space capsule.

Because it is becoming increasingly clear that this is no longer an occasional aberration but rather where the language is going now. 

That is: “between ____ & I” or “from _____ & I” and all other varieties of following a preposition with “I” because people think somehow to say ”_____ & me” is incorrect even when it is the object of something.

And now, this monstrosity is becoming more common: “____ & I’s” 

“I’s”?

“I’s”?!??!?!?!??

I can’t live on this planet any longer. I just can’t.  I can’t stay here and be a party to the wholesale slaughter of something I love so dearly.

Adore

I don’t know quite why this is, but when someone says “I adore ____”, 9 times out of 10 it translates to “I love this and I am simultaneously giving myself a pat on the back for loving it.” 

There is some kind of self-satisfaction with the slightest whiff of smugness just hardwired into that word at this point.

Driving around an ocean-front community, I am inspired to create a book of photography called “Dick Move” that will be pictures of the kind of architectural monstrosity created by someone who wants a view but does not really have one from their property.

Cigarette smoking and sincere mullets are alive and well at the Days Inn in Ocean Shores, WA.

And speaking of language fashion…

…I cannot believe anyone is still using the “Blanky McBlankerson” construction as a punchline. 

I really wish I could invent some kind of internet worm that would make every home page in the English-speaking world a list of tired, battered, exhausted, threadbare internet language trends and beg BEG people to stop using them.

Watching TV at the hotel, I learn that National Geographic is now referring to itself as “Nat Geo.”  I am sure that this abbreviated form has been used before, but the way the announcer said it just made me imagine strategy meetings about appealing to younger viewers and this was one of the sad, pointless decisions made that actually seems to highlight the old-fashionedness of something like National Geographic rather than make it seem like a contemporary of omg and lol.  (An old-fashionedness I like, btw.)

It reminds me of when I got a bunch of brightly-patterned Forenza shorts as back-to-school clothes and thought it would somehow make me seem cool.  Instead I got to school, Lauren Bradley took one look and said, with the usual Mean Girl sneer, “Are those Vans shorts?  Oh, no they’re Forenza.” My future seemed pretty clear at that moment, even though I stayed in denial about it.