Cranky Day

What a strange day. I work in a store selling non-toxic, environmentally friendly products for the house. We happen to sell a zero-VOC paint. I had to mix quite a bit of it, and we happen to be out of a lot of our stock. I was down in the cramped, barely lit, stuffy basement for a total 5 hours mixing paint. It's enough to drive a man to craziness.

My job is enough to drive me a tiny bit crazy as it is, paint issues set aside. It sometimes bothers me a lot to see the green movement being corralled into the same blatant commercialism as the rest of society. Seeing as how I work in a green retail store, I see quite a bit of this. There are so many superfluous products making "green" claims - just because a product contains recycled material does not make it green. Just because a product has a solar charger on it does not make it green.

In my mind any honest and thoughtful move towards an environmentally friendly lifestyle also requires that you allow your thoughts to encompass the worlds of social and health-related responsibility. It requires responsible, thought-out spending (not claiming that I'm there yet, for the record!).

Most of all, though, any serious attempt at an environmentally friendly lifestyle absolutely requires a sense of sustainability and necessity. There's an alarming new trend in the green movement towards mindless consumer buying that has people buying products that are wonderfully eco-friendly but completely unnecessary in their lives. This is wasteful. This is not the sort of change, I think, that was originally envisioned.

People tend to forget, I think, that there are 3 "R"s. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Number three would ideally be the last-ditch effort. First you reduce your consumption as much as possible. Forgive me for being harsh, but simply because you recycle doesn't mean that you should take glory in throwing plenty of the one-use drinking bottles into your bin. Instead, consider limiting your consumption of one-use products. Remember to reduce, and attempt to reuse.

That's all for now. Excuse the rant.

A First Post

I suppose I should get on this damned wagon. Good way to keep my thoughts together.

I'm feeling lazy at the moment. Here is a poem.

"A Dying Regime"

Neatly stacked cups

  Surround me -

Turrets of my quiet coffee cathedral.

Majesty's forgotten,

      Broken and squandered I lead the Masses

         in prayers to the Decaffeinated Christ.

Daily I see the few, the barest handful,

   The Devoted Parishioners.

     still more are the lost souls coming

       and going.

         Never the same one twice.