If you follow my feed on Twitter, then perhaps your impression of me is that of someone who spends all their time drinking liquor in front of a desktop computer screen. Let me assure you, Esteemed Reader, you couldn’t be more right!
Today I took one of my Christmas presents, a $50 CDN banknote, down to the strip mall one long residential block away from where I live in my parents basement. I bought a package of 25 filtered cigarettes from the grocer’s before heading next door to the booze mart.
Now, I don’t know about most people, but one of my friends who seldom drinks alcohol of any kind tells me that he’ll start to feel rosy (or even tipsy) after six beer in a sitting. This is not some slip of a man I’m talking about either. At 6'2" and 230 lbs. or so, he outweighs me by at least 35 lbs. Tolerance.
As someone with a reasonable palate who works sporadically, averaging just a little over a grand a month in wages, calculated booze selection is mandatory if I expect to drink every night. If only I weren’t such a bitter failure at life, my precious synaptic process wouldn’t need to be bothered by such necessitated frugality. After the clerk at the till scanned in my six pack of 8% / vol. porter, I requested my usual pint of cheap rye whiskey to go with it. Total price: $27.05.
I know someone who spends a frustrating twenty minutes a week rearranging stuff in a cramped deep freeze. That’s what you get when you can’t pass-up volume discounts in your obsession to save a few pennies. I’m gonna save money! Costs be damned!
Once you find yourself spending hard earned money and precious time on time / cost saving devices that never pay for themselves before they malfunction in some way, it’s time to reevaluate your purpose here on Earth - stuffing one's deep freeze so full of vacuum sealed meat and bulk bread, only to have them become lost in the shuffle, and wind-up freezer burned, is ultimately more wasteful than conservative. Twenty minutes a week is seventeen hours a year. As unlikely as it may be (at least where I live), I imagine scrambling to find a power generator during an unexpectedly prolonged power outage on the hottest week of summer to preserve a $2000 investment in frozen food!
My point is that some people take home economics to the extreme. Instead of hiring a cleaning lady to come in a couple of times a week, you live in a house full of space-age brooms, bottles of chemicals under every sink, robotic vacuum devices, and pantries bursting at the seams. You “invest” in home renovations during the good times, only to compete with the lowest bidder when everything goes bust.
Am I wrong to think that most people, aren’t reluctant to shun cold logic for warm fantasy? I used to do a bit of busking on Electric Avenue in downtown Calgary when I was barely out of my teens. On a good night, I’d make about $30 in a couple of hours for playing Elvis tunes over and over. Then I’d carry my guitar sixteen blocks, across the Bow river, to my uncle’s place in Calgary’s little Italy district - in the center of which was a Dutch bakery.
On one later than usual night out busking, I smelled the distinct smell of dough crusting as I approached my old flop house in Bridgeland. I couldn't believe anything was open for retail business before 5:00 AM, but there they were. With $40 worth of Loonies and Twonies jangling in my pocket, I thought, "What the hell."
Arrived home that morning with a couple of nice round loaves, still fluffy, and infused with hints of sage and other spices. Today it makes me think of suburban life. Gone are Damien the baker and Octavius the butcher. In their place are homogeneous aisles of stocked goods that glisten not with the moist glaze of a fresh cut of meat, nor butter brushed onto a crust, but of overhead fluorescent lights and cellophane.
At the end of the day, it makes me think that much of the middle class are more than willing to trade-in a proper lifestyle for a false sense of being consumer savvy.
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