I've been thinking about how paradoxical it is that Memorial Day in the US is treated as yet another excuse to flaunt a teetering opulence, to over-consume (food especially), considering how destructive wartime conditions prove to the availability of food. How much of our fun and recreation in this country is contingent upon demonstrations of surplus? Does this shallow focus on excess deplete our imaginations? Does the tendency to horde replicas of our present in the form of overstocked supermarkets and pantries and viscera, render us too neurotic to invent new options for our futures? All of it. Yes. I want all of it. I want the all of everything. I think some hypocrisy is useful. I don't believe in guilt. Or that innocence has an opposite or an automatic sympathy quotient. Most mischief is a demonstration, a plea for medicine, a reenactment of certain nightmares, or a prayer for the alltime armistice which requires calling some attention to the battle ongoing and dormant beneath our dormant hunger. The inauthentic grace is a fear of guilt, but the rest is the bravery to want the all off everything
