These are from last week, but they always make me laugh. I’d say they are a pretty good representation of my internet life…for better and worse.

Internet notes, just to fill up space because it causes me psychic pain to have my angry face up first on the blog:

I just happened on my blog stats for today and was a little sad because ye olde blogge only had one hit. Then I realized it was 12:01 AM.

Blog search terms for yesterday (anyone who has a blog knows that these are the best part):

modern buildings
worlds largest stove
kids in garden
“cat power”
best facebook status updates
resistance is fertile
cacao
i fucking love life!
women fake beauty
ariel levy 70s lesbians

I know the person who Googles “Resistance is Fertile” most days–he doesn’t want to bookmark my scandalous site at work!

I fucking love life! person: I fucking love you!!

“Modern buildings” and “best Facebook status update” are by far the terms people use most to get here. I don’t get why this admittedly rather silly post on modern buildings is constantly being read—I fear some architecture professor talks about it in class and ruthlessly mocks my radical feminist, building-hating ways. I literally think about things like this at night when I can’t sleep: “I wonder what is being said about this vegan chef’s position on spiky buildings in architecture classes?”

The fact that so many people search on “best Facebook status update” used to really depress me. These days I just wonder how many people are actually using “ships and sails and walnut whales, clams and crabs and cockles and cowries: you know, just chillaxin” as their update.

Tonight I was explaining to my friend Noel (you know Noel!) about how I am in this ludicrous bloggy phase of my life right now and how I feel it’s saving me all this money in therapy dollars and Jacob’s precious hearing.* I explained it thusly: “You know that Muriel Rukeyser quote about how the world splits open every time a woman tells the truth about her life or whatever?”

And she got it. 1970s feminists get that kind of jive. And it made me remember how much I love MuRu and that quote, and I figured I’d toss it on the blog. So I did, see right.

Then I Googled it and realized that that quote is perhaps THE “I was a Women’s Studies major and I have a blog” quote, and now I feel super sheepish. (Also, I can’t get it to properly space itself so I have to use the annoying / between lines and that is sort of / kind of / just a little bit / irritating / the hell out of me / like / like no witty simile I can think of right now.)

Am I being super dorky with my overly sincere quote here, or what? My love for The Ruke is blinding me, and I can’t decide. Am I tossing on my blog the equivalent of an American Apparel dress and zigzaggy hair on a hipster girl in Williamsburg? Am I cliché to the max?

If so, I’d like to state that I’ve been loving Rukeyz since before half those girly bloggers were born, probably. How can you not love her?

I’d rather be Muriel

Than be dead and be Ariel.

I mean, come the fuck on. She’s the shiz. Take that, Sylvia!

The Poem as Mask

Orpheus

When I wrote of the women in their dances and
wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone
down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from
myself.

There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory
of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued
child
beside me among the doctors, and a word
of rescue from the great eyes.

No more masks! No more mythologies!

Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.

Oh, baby. Tell me more.

——

*Sample dialogue:

Me: “OMG OMG OMG SO LIKE UM SO LIKE OMG so I was reading this article and did you hear about that dude who and Brittany’s blog says and what do you think of my hair and HuffPo says and I have so much more cooking to do whine whine whine and try this chocolate and look at this Lolcat and OH!!! LISTEN TO THIS!!!!”

Repeat x10,000

Jacob: [weary, bleary, trying to get work done]

Me: “BLAH BLAH BLAH OMG OMG OMG OMG”

Jacob: “Shhhh…it’s 4 am.”

Me: “Why must you tamp down my natural effervescense?”

Jacob: “Of course, I want to hear all about it. But sometimes…it hurts.” Unspoken: “Literally, my love, it hurts. Because you have been talking for eight hours straight. And sometimes doing weird dances to punctuate your points that make me wonder if you have to pee.”

I was born with excess energy, and it’s a pretty constant problem. Once I had a sip of coffee and was up for three days. Blogging suits me, that’s what I’m trying to say.

Um. I wrote this post at 4 AM last night. That’s my excuse.

Also deserving of an excuse I cannot provide (except to say that I am a ridiculous person) is that I am now the kind of person who wears a ribbon bow on their head, though they are more than a third of a century old. I have so many ribbon scraps!

Moving on:

I try to keep my business and my blog fairly separate. A lot of my Upper West Sidey clients [I should just change the name of my meal delivery service to Lagusta's Luscious Food for People Who Live On The UWS. I swear 80% of my clients live on those leafy brownstoney streets] are sweet, wholesome people, and I don’t want to subject them to my profanity-laced ramblings. But I talk so much about my business on the blog in a way that chocolate customers especially might be interested in, that I feel sad that I try to hide it. On the other hand, I also talk about:

• My vag.
• Not liking dudes.
• Or married people.
• Or babies.
• Or people in general.
• The word “fuck.”
• The word “fucking.”
• The word “shit.”
• The overwhelming, all-consuming, head-to-toe rage that periodically engulfs me completely.
• etc.

(If at this point you are saying: “but Lagusta, I recently emailed you and your email signature has a link to your blog in it, WTF!” Aha! I have two email signatures! I am sneaky!)

I can’t decide. I also have this question about Facebook. I like to separate Lagusta from Lagusta’s Luscious on Facebook. Only one of my clients is my FB friend, and I constantly worry that he is all “Hmm, how interesting that her status update is currently ‘douching.*’”

On the other hand, if I was really a businesswoman I would have businessy pages for the chocos and meals on Facebook. But oh, the very idea makes me tired. If I didn’t have all these unwholesome ideas and vitriol and things, I wouldn’t have this problem, but I do, so I do, and I think about it a lot.

I think it’s pretty obvious that I run my business with values other than capitalism at its center, but I also think it’s important to be professional to a certain extent, you know? At the same time, it’s important to feed those parts of myself that are most adamantly not professional. Balance, all that.

—-

*Do I even need to say that this is a made-up status update? But how HILARIOUS would it be? Ladies, I sort of want to dare you to have “douching” as your status update.

…[thinks about this]…

OK, OK! Let’s do(uche) this!—if you have “douching” as your Facebook status update for one solid week, I will send you a box of vulvas, promise. And it can’t be “douching (so I can get a free box of vulva-shaped chocolates.)” It has to be straight up “douching.” And you have to have more than like 20 friends, otherwise it’ll be no fun. And if you get a bunch of well-meaning comments like “But don’t you know that douching is not healthy?” You can’t say you are doing it to get chocolate. You have to act like you are seriously douching. Just to mess with people. It’s good to mess with people! We’re so beyond douching that it’s hilarious to joke about it! Right?

Um. THIS IS WHY I SHOULD NOT HAVE A LINK TO THE BLOG!

Wow, that whole thing very neatly resolved itself, didn’t it?

WOW! All my weird feelings about blogging are completely erased—blogging is magical! Commentariat Leah has totally done me a solid–she found the mystical, magical, and heretofore mythical pink and yellow truffle cups that I have been searching for for years! Yay!!!!!! Leah, your Googling skills are wide and deep, and I am in awe. The trick seems to have been searching under alternative search terms (“petite four [sic] cups”!) that had never occurred to me. Leah’s crazy skills led to an Amazon site selling the cups. I bought all that were available, and worried that they were discontinued cups available in limited amounts. When the cups came (perfect size, perfect color, PERFECTION!) they bore the name of a website I will not give to anyone even under severest torture. This beautiful website is selling the cups as if they are a regular product, albeit in pathetic 50-cup packs. I am in talks with them vis-à-vis quantity discounts/how many they have on hand/long-term availability, etc.

But I have a good stash for now, and it is with great pleasure that I can send Leah the promised five free truffle boxes! Leah, please email me (lagusta at lagusta.com) with which boxes you’d like and I will send them out this week! (I am assuming you are a stranger Leah and not my former tenant Leah, or myself-using-my-Hebrew-name Leah, or my first grade b.f.f. [not really the last "f" though] Leah, but if you are any of these, let me know!)

In other work news, my busiest two weeks of the year are just gearing up, and I am full of energy and up for the mountain that is Thanksgiving meals and truffles. If I get a moment to catch my breath, I will show you some amazing pictures of a beet that just might give you nightmares—seriously! Watch for it!

In the meantime, though I constantly mock my slipshod hippie childhood, I sometimes can’t stop myself from believing in ultra-hippie concepts my parents instilled in me. Declaring one’s intentions to the universe in the hopes that the universe will respond is one of those bits of ridiculousness. Whenever we wanted something as kids we were directed to send out “vibes to the universe” in order to get it. It didn’t really work with things like bikes for Christmas/Hanukkah, but I have to admit that I like the idea of making your hopes and intentions public in order to scoot them a little closer to reality. I try to pretend my little notes to myself on my work chalkboard are just that, reminders to myself, but deep down I know I’m sending a message to the cosmos. Atheists can believe in the power of good vibes, right?

Let’s do it!

Reading at the desk while eating somen noodles with eggplant in garlic sauce: a perfect night

To prepare you for a blog post I will post tomorrow, I’d like to share a few thoughts from Nick Hornby on the subject of lean versus fat prose. My preference is usually to read the former and write the latter – and I used to think that meant I should change my writing style, except I love my writing style, so oh well.

Since I left college and broke free of an English major’s tightass tidy prose, I’ve been enjoying finding my own comfortable, lazy, loopy, bloggy way of writing. Hopefully it doesn’t annoy you too much. I’m not sure it’s pleasant for the reader, but I love clauses and commas and dashes and prepositions and starting paragraphs with “So anyway” to bring the panting reader back around to the point I was starting to make before a bunch of other interesting peripherally related things entered my head concurrently.

To wit: My mother just taught me that you shouldn’t use a hyphen after an adverb. Who knew? I tend to be a bit of an over-dasher and over-hyphener, I know that. I also never bother to make my hyphens into em dashes when they should properly be such because it’s too bothersome (note to self: write blog posts in Word, which does it for you). Instead, I put a completely incorrect space between the hyphens, which any good editor will tell you is crap. Hopefully this horrific punctuational faux pas doesn’t make you too crazy.

So anyway, the article is below, but first, a bit of ephemera.

Whenever I don’t talk to my travellin’ sweetheart for a day, I begin to obsessively search for news items on the band he works with, in case they are all caught in a festival mudslide or something. That’s how I came across this pair of articles, one from Salon and one from the L.A. Times. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I pretty much agree with both. And it was interesting to read them while Nick Hornby’s thoughts were fresh in my mind, because C.O. is so well-known for his rambly you-know-who-esque lyrics. Does any songwriter embody the more-is-more aesthetic more than Conor Oberst? The thing I like about Conor is that his heart is always open and his lyrics, the bloated ones and the spare poetic ones, the angry ones and the depressed ones, are always real. I’ll take real over fake fat or too-cool too-skinny any day.

And now the article, which is just an excerpt because you have to pay to read it all, which reminds me: I should really get a subscription to The Believer. My friend Katy says it’s good, and she has taste coming out her ears. I think enough time has elapsed from my intense dislike of that Dave Eggers book everyone loved (I’ve never met anyone that disliked A Staggering Pile O’ Heartbreaking Crap I Should Love You For, But Don’t, And That Makes Me Feel Weird – please let me know if you didn’t care for it either so I feel a little less alone) for me to go back to the McSweeney’s crew. A friend writes for them once in a while (I just love this one of his), so does an old, old school lagusta.com fan, Douglas Wolk (whose book I keep meaning to read), so I feel comfortable in the McSweeney’s world, and should fully embrace it.

Stuff I’ve Been Reading (May 2005)

A Monthly Column

by Nick Hornby

BOOKS BOUGHT:

* Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
* What Narcissism Means to Me—Tony Hoagland
* David Copperfield—Charles Dickens (twice)

BOOKS READ

* David Copperfield—Charles Dickens

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress. What’s that chinking noise? It’s the sound of the assiduous creative-writing student hitting bone. You can’t read a review of, say, a Coetzee book without coming across the word “spare,” used invariably with approval; I just Googled “J. M. Coetzee + spare” and got 907 hits, almost all of them different. “Coetzee’s spare but multi-layered language,” “detached in tone and spare in style,” “layer upon layer of spare, exquisite sentences,” “Coetzee’s great gift—and it is a gift he extends to us—is in his spare and yet beautiful language,” “spare and powerful language,” “a chilling, spare book,” “paradoxically both spare and richly textured,” “spare, steely beauty.” Get it? Spare is good.

Coetzee, of course, is a great novelist, so I don’t think it’s snarky to point out that he’s not the funniest writer in the world. Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you’re doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they’re the first things to go. And there’s some stuff about the whole winnowing process that I just don’t get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words—entirely coincidentally, I’m sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I’m sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there’s nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound like manly, back-breaking labor because it’s such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It’s also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers—treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won’t mind! Have you ever looked at the size of books in an airport bookstall? The truth is that people like superfluity. (And, conversely, the writers’ writers, the pruners and the winnowers, tend to have to live off critical approval rather than royalty checks.)

Last month, I ended by saying that I was in need of some Dickensian nutrition, and maybe it’s because I’ve been sucking on the bones of pared-down writing for too long. Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town! If you want to talk about books in terms of back-breaking labor, then maybe we should think about how hard it is to write a lot—long books, teeming with exuberance and energy and life and comedy. I’m sorry if that seems obvious, but it can’t always be true that writing a couple of hundred pages is harder than writing a thousand.) At one point near the beginning of the book, David runs away, and ends up having to sell the clothes he’s wearing for food and drink. It would be enough, maybe, to describe the physical hardship that ensued; but Dickens being Dickens, he finds a bit part for a real rogue of a secondhand clothes merchant, a really scary guy who smells of rum and who shouts things like “Oh, my lungs and liver” and “Goroo!” a lot.

(Buy it to finish reading!)

While adding some links tonight, I came across this awesome write up for my awesome delivery woman and pal, Megan’s B&B. Being a Treehugger praisee myself, I was happy to see I’m in such good company.

I’m not quite sure why, but in the past few months I have been super all about loving up my friends. One day it just occurred to me that I have this lovely group of friends, and I should love them up more. So, I am. Tonight, with links.

To come: links to trusted New Paltz-area farms! I know you are waiting with baited breath.

It’s a beautiful day at the end of the world, and this is a test post from a girl who deeply believes that overuse of technology is hurting our common humanity but still wants to see if she can blog from her phone.

Here’s a picture of my cat Noodle with her ear turned inside out!

Women: A Feminist Perspective is the hilarious title of a book in my woman-only bookshelf in my womany pink room. Working under the “room of one’s own” principle, instead of turning our extra bedroom into a guest room, we force our guests to sleep in the pink room. The pink room is my office and quiet space. It’s pink with red windows and trim, pink and red being, of course, the best color combination ever invented. (My mother always rolls her eyes incredulously when I profess my undying love for pink. She did the very best job she could trying to make sure the world didn’t force me into being a girly girl. She mostly succeeded, except for a weakness for vintage dresses and a love of the girliest shades of pink imaginable.)

I put my most radical feminist books in there, thinking Mary Daly and Katherine MacKinnon wouldn’t want to mix with the Thoreau and Malcolm X and Kurt Vonnegut in the library (um, the other potential guest bedroom we turned into my sweetheart’s office and the library. We are selfish hoarders, what can I say? We have a very nice air mattress for the pink room.).

The pink room has everything I need to center myself and escape from the real world: a nice tidy desk no one ever messes with, views of trees and sky and nothing else (on summer nights I swear I can hear the faraway cows by the rail trail mooing—do cows moo at night, or am I imagining this?),

happily messy ideas and inspiration,

and, of course, books and cats.

I will never understand how Noodle the cat magically works herself into every photo.

Though (standard disclaimer alert:) I have many male friends and am in love with a great man who shares my life and house, I value and adore woman-only spaces.

My beloved Bloodroot restaurant used to have a women-only night. Every Wednesday night a woman would stand sentry at the door and tell any XYs that they were closed.

Some women came for a meeting of the now-defunct G. Knapp Historical Society. Goody Knapp was a women hung for being witch in 1653 in Bridgeport, CT, where the restaurant is located. In their 1980 cookbook The Political Palate (WordPress won’t let me underline, so please know that I know that a book should be underlined, not bold, oy!) – the first of six Bloodroot cookbooks – the Bloodroot women write that “her death, like 9 million others between the 14th and 17th centuries, was an act of woman hating…Andrea Dworkin has said in reference of the genocide of witches: ‘A lot of knowledge disappears with 9 million people.’ The G. Knapp Historical Society is an attempt to remind women that such knowledge must not disappear again.”

(Much as I love both Bloodroot and Andrea Dworkin, I have to state that the nine million figure quoted above has been roundly rejected by many other feminist scholars—I can’t find the stats that are thought to be most accurate, but I believe they are in the 1 million range. No one is really sure where nine million came from.)

Many women, however, came on Wednesdays because of the special power that comes from women-only spaces. I learned this working at Bloodroot. At first I didn’t see the value of working with all women, but it truly does make a difference. It sounds a little silly to say, but never underestimate the power of not having to worry about if your shirt is rising too high and exposing your stomach when you reach up to get the bread pans. Something special happens when you can’t ask the boy to bring in the flour sacks, truly, it does. Yes, often it’s just that you will ask the most butchy lesbian around, but I love the problem-solving that happens at Bloodroot, the honest conversations, the way “women’s issues” are taken seriously and throughly discussed, with everyone allowed an equal voice.

The truth is: I love women. The owners of Bloodroot, Selma and Noel, once decided to call me a “political lesbian,” and though I wouldn’t have chosen the label for myself, it fits, and since they are real live lesbians, I’ll not question their power to bestow the label on others. I am in love with a man, but in pretty much all other ways I am a woman-identified woman in that I vastly prefer women to men.

I love watching women. I love the little game that gets played out on the streets of big cities where if you like a woman’s outfit you’ll turn around to look at her from the back. Have you ever done that and the woman you’re looking at turns to platonically check you out too? God, I love that. I always think: “Look at us! We’re so cool!” Maybe the other woman is thinking “why is that freak staring at me?,” but I prefer to think she’s thinking the same thing I am.

Women checking each other out—let’s be honest about it. It happens because women are beautiful.

Men are not beautiful. My man happens to be gorgeous and the cutest boy in the universe, but as a whole men kind of freak me out. Overall they are lumpy and misshapen, especially when dressed in their typical American uniforms of those terrible white-soled sneakers and baggy t-shirts.

Women, on the other hand—I could look at their jaw bones, the shape of their legs, the curve of their arms all day long. I’m know I’m not alone in this.

Either you feel me or you don’t when I say that I deeply feel the essential mysterious awesomeness at the center of the world of women. If you don’t feel me you’ll think I’m silly and reductionist and essentialist, and that’s your right. Maybe I am silly and reductionist and essentialist. Who cares? We’re not in Women’s Studies 101 anymore. We’re in the pink room.

(Hey, I wrote an essay about this in relation to women on the left, if you’re interested.)

Thinking about these kinds of issues lately, I’ve decided that I’d like to keep rolling with the woman-mostly space I seem to have created here. No offense to you good dudes out there—but have you noticed that almost all of you fine commenters are women? I like that. I want to publicly encourage this trend of mostly women talking to mostly women in this little corner of the internet. I know some very fine male specimens, so please keep reading and commenting and being my friend, but the idea of a woman-mostly blog is so great, isn’t it?

A little balance, a little privacy, a little space to be taken seriously – pink walls and all. Let’s do it.

It’s very important to me to stay true to my rabble-rousing roots and not to get bogged down in mainstream thinking. Mainstream thinking is what most people are caught in all the time, and it is a super contagious virus against which one must always be vigilant.

Not to be elitist or anything, but most people are stupid fucking idiots whose heads are filled with such complete shite that even being near them gives me chills.

Basically, it’s important for me to keep track of the bottom line: complete and total rehauling of our current society. Not with guns, but with joyful rebellion of the everyday kind: by living as humans should live. Instant revolution. It’s a lot easier than you think. Affirming and celebrating the choices that lead to revolutionary and transformative living is a good part of why I decided to step into the murky blogging waters.

Of course, it only half works. People with hearts can’t go completely underground and become so consumed with perfecting their lives that they turn a blind eye to the structures that are busy undoing all their righteous recycled-paper toilet paper purchases. It’s important to still do insanely boring things like going to town board meetings and working for progressive candidates.

Because of that, most people I know are caught in a weird inbetween place where we are constantly weighing buying stuff from Wal-Mart and saving money vs. buying from small companies and feeling a little bit like suckers for paying more. Wouldn’t it be better to just buy from Wal-Mart and donate the money saved? No. For one thing, you are not going to donate the money, let’s just face it. For another: fuck Wal-Mart.

Let me expand/expound on that.

* * *

The other day the owner of a local pizzeria came into my kitchen with a nice pressed appearance (chinos, polo shirt, short hair) and a little name tag and chatted for a minute, all business owner-to-business ownery. He told me that he had a little side business drumming up business for Sam’s Club and started telling me all about the money I could save with a Sam’s Club membership. When I politely told him I would rather die (not in those exact terms), he said he completely understood the political reasons not to buy from Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club, but the money you could save was ridiculous. And he said I could fill out some “business form” and all my purchases would magically be tax-free. This whole episode was mildly alarming – is there really such a tax loophole? Does Sam’s Club operate via pyramid scheme these days? Was the pizzeria really that slow?

* * *

Recently a Lowe’s Hardware moved in way too close to my little town. There was a lot of resistance to it, but it was located just on the border of New Paltz in the town next door, so really there is nothing we could do about it. It annoyed a lot of people in town because there is a Lowe’s twenty minutes away in three directions. Seriously. North, south, and east – go twenty minutes and you’ll hit a Lowe’s.

After it opened, some idiot wrote a letter to the paper saying that he had seen one of the town board members who had passionately argued against the Lowe’s in that very store buying some lumber or something.

WTF people. Let me break it down for you in handy bulleted points:

-Lowes is a big box store, and thus is actively fucking over the planet.

-In an ideal world we would have lovely independent warehouse-type stores who would source ethically and responsibly, pay their employees well, etc.

-In an ideal world, we would pay a whole lot more for things, but it would be OK because we would all get paid more too.

-In our current world, it is better to shop at our little mom-and-pop hardware store than Lowe’s, as it is just more fucking pleasant to shop there. Some progressives I know would argue that the mom-and-pop store would be Lowe’s if it could so what’s the difference, but these people are stupid.

-Said mom-and-pop store does not have all the inventory that Lowe’s has.

-Since the mythical ideal-world warehouse store doesn’t exist, one needs to go to Lowe’s now and then. While it is idiotic to have four Lowe’s in an hour radius, we now have such a situation, and must act accordingly.

-Where we used to save up Lowe’s purchases until we had a sufficient amount to justify the 20-minute drive, the stupid situation of having so many around means that when we are passing by the stupid store, we will pop in for 0 VOC paint or a new refrigerator. C’est la vie.

* * *

This philosophy (work for change but admit that sometimes you have to live in the world as it is) has its limits, and everyone has to decide for themselves where those lines are drawn. I will shop at Lowe’s because they donate to Democrats, whereas Home Despot donates to Republicans. I don’t personally care for Democrats, but what can you do. I will shop at Lowe’s, but I have only been in a Wal-Mart once and it made me so sick at heart I had to sit in the car and do some positive visualization before I felt safe enough to drive. (In fairness, I think it was an extra-horrible Wal-Mart [Newburgh, NY].)

I won’t set a foot in Wal-Mart, but I have to go to Target to buy cooler bags and containers for my business. The cooler bags are made in China and I have yet to find any that aren’t, and I have to buy them in Target because ordering them wholesale means almost twice as much to a company I care about just as little as I care about Target, so what can I do?

Also, and this cannot be discounted – Target is a more pleasant store to shop in than Wal-mart.

Obviously, I make concessions. But I’m constantly weighing the concessions, and it annoys the fuck out of me when other people refuse to think at all. So when my friend Dave, a super thoughtful and concerned farmer who thinks a lot about these same issues, sent me this little tidbit about Wal-Mart buying local produce, I resisted the urge to flippantly discount it as yet another example of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and actually thought it through. (Note to Dave: this intensely bilious post is not in any way directed at you! Thank you for the forward!)

Happily, the more I thought about it the more I came to think that my initial one-track mind liberal response – “Wal-Mart bad!” – was totally correct. Here are the facts (from Grist – check out the comments too) then some commentary:

“You thought you took home a haul at the farmers’ market last week, but you’ve got nothin’ on Wal-Mart. The big-box retailer has become the nation’s largest buyer of local produce, planning to purchase and
sell $400 million worth of locally grown fruits and veggies this year. Wal-Mart says it works with “hundreds” of individual farmers, and has 50 percent more partnerships with local growers than it did in 2006. During the summer months, says the company, one-fifth of available produce in Wal-Mart stores
is sourced locally. An emphasis on local produce — which Wal-Mart defines as grown and sold in the same state — keeps the company’s delivery trucks from burning about 100,000 gallons of diesel, slices its customers’ farm-to-plate distance by 672,000 miles, and saves it $1.4 million each year.”

Well hoo-fucking-ray for Wal-Mart. You get a fucking gold star. Seriously – our society is so incredibly backward that it’s news when a company does something it should have been doing all along. Wal-Mart is a very large reason that our sourcing systems are so incredibly wasteful and inefficient, and now they do one teeny tiny good thing -again, something they should have been doing all along! – and we’re all supposed to suck their dicks.

I’m sorry for the profanity, but seriously.

Maybe they can take one small step toward full personhood (because corporations are people, you know that, right? You have watched The Corporation, right? Right? I know I’m getting too hyped up about this, but my blood is boiling!!) and stop locking their employees in at night, or start selling emergency contraception, or allow HIV prevention events on their premises, or allow their workers to unionize (so well-known I won’t bother to link to it), or stop selling t-shirts making fun of stalking women, or do a bit more to stop their employees and customers from being assaulted, raped, and killed because of their parking lots are so unsafe, or or or or.

No, I will not be shopping at Wal-Mart anytime soon.

Thankfully, I don’t have to. It’s important to remember that there are neighborhoods in which Wal-Mart is the only food source. For this reason, of course it’s good that they are buying more local produce. But it only makes me one small percent less angry at them and the idiotic system they have helped built. I know there are some people – Michael Pollan comes to mind – who are probably creaming their pants over this. Good for them. I’ll let them be excited.

I am a revolutionary, I am a radical, I am a means-are-the-ends-er, and Wal-Mart has no place in my ideal world. Life is too short to not work for this ideal world, and to get bogged down into caring about tiny steps in the right direction that the enemy takes. You live in your world, and I’ll live in mine. Until yours comes (peacefully!) crumbling down because it is so useless, and then we will all see how great my world will be. Idiotic terrifying smiley faces will not be part of it.