It's good to see you. Come on in, leave your shoes in the hallway, we've got fire on the stove preparing lunch for later. In the meantime, browse the bookshelves and plunk down on the sofa with one, or pick out some tunes from the music library or come in to the kitchen to help with the cooking. Our special blend of tea is steeping and will be right up.

Make yourself at home...

This past weekend was Easter. Having not been a practicing Catholic for decades, I wasn't aware of it until a friend mentioned it in an email that my gig last week was on Good Friday. For me there was very little joy in those lugubrious services, too much hubris and conservative parochial thinking amongst its practitioners and priests, so I naturally grew cold to it.

During it I was reminded that every holiday, significant moment, and even the most mundane errands, seem to have been seized by and become the domain of uber-capitalists. Nothing is sacred anymore, nothing is left unmolested by the greasy fingers of the money-changers. Everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale. Just look at the entire government.

Especially in our most vulnerable states, we are preyed upon by the profit-seekers. Ever go to a funeral home, and listen to the spiel of the director talking about coffin types, headstones, etc - and then drops an insane price on you? Or the process by which an insurance company keeps putting you off, burying you in reams of fine print legalese designed solely to obfuscate and buy them time, when it's you who can't buy time? Or the hidden costs of having a baby in a hospital, in which you were pretty sure your insurance plan covered it all, only to be stuck with a bill for thousands of dollars? All of these tactics fall under the aegis of "good business" practices, when you live under full-blown and barely-regulated capitalism.

What galls me most is that every holiday is driven hard by consumerism, the engine of capitalism. Even Halloween, a throwaway day that was more about adolescent mischief than anything else when I was growing up, has been assimilated into a fully omnipotent capitalist "event" and become more like a holiday these days.

The period of fall into winter, for millennia, was for human beings traditionally a time of contemplation, to take stock in things, regeneration, to gather, share and conserve, etc. That scared togetherness has been turned on its head. Now, from as early as September, retail stores begin a season long barrage of marketing and advertising, with help from the schools, until the end of the year. They ramp up with shelves full of junk candy and displays of Halloween paraphernalia, which then gets turned right over for the commodification of Thanksgiving and a nauseating shopping holiday the day after (the name I refuse to use), and then again right into the Christmas onslaught we've been conditioned to the longest.

Another aspect of super-hyping these holidays that disturbs me, is the invariable comedown that one can't escape from, when the expectations have become so overheated by a relentless focus on it. Instead of the steadiness that a balanced life offers, a healthy philosophy of regular get togethers of folks and occasionally exchanging objects of appreciation, we seem to put to be willing participants in going along with these few sanctioned holiday "events," as acceptable substitutes for the most basic and fulfilling fundamentally human things, gathering together regularly with loved ones and friends.

So to return to Easter, we were up and out early on a warm and inviting Saturday, upon which it was obvious people had made plans to mark the weekend as an event for kids. The park was aflutter with activity even at 8:30 in the morning, with people setting up tables and yellow taped areas, a Free Coffee station table and an area for toddlers from 0-2. They weren't starting until 10am so we trekked on to another part of the park where it happened another kids-type Easter event was taking place.

The crowd assembled here was more hipster, and included lots of beards, the ubiquitous baseball caps letting you know where folks are from and fancy strollers of all kinds. They had laid out on a park picnic table, franchise coffee boxes, fresh baked donuts from a local bakery in town, some fruit, water, etc. Apparently it was an Easter egg hunt that a group of moms had organized via a social media group.

My cynicism, like my allergies in the springtime, began kicking up. One side of me couldn't help respecting and appreciating their organizing efforts, and I couldn't deny it was good to be part of such a social event for parents and their children. But as a relatively new and older parent, watching a crowd of kids dressed up in various bunny gear and jauntily rocking expensive-looking baskets by their sides, all to collect as many "eggs" as they could gather, I became my cynic self again.

Maybe I'm inclined toward a bit too much contempt about the over-commodification of everything in our lives as I see it. But when I see an event, in which kids are encouraged to grab as much free stuff as they can for themselves (like Halloween), and that features as its centerpiece plastic colored eggs (no doubt manufactured, assembled and packaged in slave labor camps in SE Asia) filled with cheap American high-fructose laden "candy," it troubles me on just about every level.

First of all the obvious: that Easter, the most holy day in that religion, is sold to the public with bunny rabbits and candy. I mean, I have no vested interest in this, but it would seem the height of hypocrisy and spiritual vacancy that it has come to be known as such. As usual, Bill Hicks nailed it:

(sorry for the lesser quality video that also has subtitles, but it's hard to find good clips of Hicks these days)

Second, aren't we implying to the child in some ways, that by encouraging the collecting of as many of these colored, plastic toy eggs as possible, it is good to be greedy, when one will be rewarded with an approving pat on the head? I may be a little too strong there, but I often wonder when it occurs to a child that his "things" are "his"? Only when we tell them that, I think. I was sitting in a circle of parents around their children at a library event when the music and singing part opened up into a games part. The son of the woman next to me had grabbed a ball that my son was holding and the mother apologized. I said it was no matter, there were plenty of them and besides not any of us owned any of these things. She said something like, "he (or we) wants them all." Capitalism from the start - the American way.

And then on top of it all, what the kids were encouraged to excitedly collect to bring home, was the literally the worst kind of food (obscene amounts of refined sugar and syrup) you could feed a growing child. Moreover, it irresponsibly creates a desire for a certain kind of artificial and harmful "treat," which is more a mutation of nature than something that comes from the earth, ultimately having the effect of discouraging the developing palette from recognizing natural and healthy food.

By the time we returned to the other side of the park, where it was a decidedly different, predominately ethnic and immigrant family crowd attending a church-sponsored event, and saw the strollers lining up to get their picture taken with the big white Easter Bunny, I'd had enough. And wondered how I'd negotiate this kind of stuff going forward, in terms of being a parent in such an offensive world.

I don't much care if the other parents see me as an outlier, because of my penchant for discernment, dissent and contempt. If it gets more than a few talking about the corrosive exploits of capitalism, I'm content to be The Loner.

So, what's going on with you?

Back in the kitchen we're listening to:

Reading/Browsing List:
"Echoes of Revolt: The Masses (1911-1917)"
"Treatise On The Gods" H.L. Mencken
"No Place To Hide" Glenn Greenwald

West Indian Fish Stew (inspired by leftover N. Italian Chick Pea Soup)

cook brown rice in separate pot.

Sauté thinly-sliced onions until crisp. Sauté carrots and sliced cabbage until slightly brown.
Add chopped ginger, then garlic.
Add thin, small pieces of Codfish.
Add paprika, chopped thyme, turmeric and Indian hot chili powder. Stir.
Add soup.

Bring to a boil. Serve with chopped cilantro on top.

Lemongrass Chai Blend

heaping scoop of dried Thai lemongrass
shards of cinnamon bark
a few cardamom pods
a few black peppercorns
A few cloves
fresh chopped ginger