MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in the lounge at work, eating my lunch with the day crew, watching something on TV.  I don’t have cable, so I generally don’t pay very much attention to what’s going on television.  If I need to know about it, I heard about it on Pacifica in the morning on the way to work.  If I want to watch it, it’ll be on Netflix eventually.  The shit they show on cable really has no effect on my day to day.  So, it’s usually just background noise.  But as I sat there, eating my leftover tuna casserole, I heard something that made me look up.  It was a $4000 coffee table.  I looked up and saw a $4000 dollar coffee table on the 60” plasma in the lounge.  Wow.  That’s nice.  I have no idea what I would do with a coffee table that cost more the value of everything I own, collectively.  Excessive, but nice.  Starting there, DIY network had my attention. 

The show is called Building House.  If you have been fortunate enough not to see it, it’s about a couple who are renovating their home.  He’s a contractor, she’s an interior designer.  They have three children and she is VERY pregnant with their fourth.  They are taking their “small” home and renovating it into the house of their dreams.  They are shacked up in some small apartment while the renovation is taking place.  They are WAY over budget, and, clearly, the $4000 coffee table is only part of the problem.  They want all of this shit that they can’t afford.  So, Chad, the man of the project, goes to his father to ask for a SEVENTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR “loan.”  First, who asks their parents for $75,000?  Second, if you already can’t afford to build the house on your own, you probably won’t be able to pay back the loan.  That should be the first indication that you want MORE than you can afford.  For that matter, more than you need.  Last year I had to replace my sliding glass door when a rogue rock from the weed wacker shattered the glass into one GAZILLION pieces.  It cost $600 dollars that I didn’t have, but I paid for it anyway and I didn’t call my daddy to ask him to help me pay for it.  That was $600.  I can’t even imagine what it would feel like to ask for 75K.  But he did it. 

Anyway, as television loves to do, it created all this drama with the couple asking for an exorbitant amount of money, and naturally, their guilty parents denied their request.  And we, as the viewing public, screamed “OH NO!!!!  WHAT WILL THEY DO NOW???”  Yeah.  What will poor Chad and Jen do now?  Of course, the show went on, and after multiple babysitters quit working because their kids were awful, uncontrolled little humans, and nobody could get any work done because the children needed to be cared for, they hired a nanny.  Who quit immediately.  Because they suck and so do their kids.  There was a lot of other stuff that happened in the 25 minutes that I was watching everything that is wrong with American culture transpire on this reality TV show.  But the point is this.  A DIY channel reality show about renovating a house is all about MORE.  It’s not about doing it yourself.  It’s about a family of five, expecting their sixth.  Those parents can’t even take care of the children they have, much less another one.  They couldn’t afford what they wanted without a “loan”, so they asked somebody to give them MORE of what they couldn’t afford.  They didn’t even realize that a $4000 coffee was MORE than excessive.  The entire premise of the show is MORE for ME. MORE.  MORE.  MORE.  ME.  ME.  ME.  There was no talk of WE at all.  Needless to say, these people are very unlikable.  But they keep us watching.  Because if they can have more, we can have more!!!

I realize that was a very long prelude to a very short message, but I do have a point here.  And it’s not just that I’m disgusted with the MORE culture.  I’m less concerned with what we think is MORE important, than what we forget when we want MORE.  We want more house.  More cars.  More money.   More dates on our calendar.  We want to be more affluent and more endowed and more important.   We want MORE of all that.  But in obtaining more, we give less to what is important.  When you work hard to get a big house and a fancy car and a lot of irrelevant friends, you don’t have time to work towards what you really need MORE of.  You don’t have any time to live more.

 

While I am in complete agreement that we all need more, we are working MORE so we can have MORE things.  We aren’t working toward what we actually need more of.  And, since you’ve made it this far, I don’t want to leave you without an answer.  So, I am now going to tell you what we need more of.  We need more sunny days.  Not so much that there aren’t enough sunny days.  But we need to enjoy more sunny days.  Florescent lights do not count as sunny days.  Sunny days where you wear shorts and flip flops and not enough sunscreen and when you take a shower, you regret not wearing more sunscreen.  We need more books.  Not books that you buy with your credit card on Amazon and read on an electronic device.  Books with actual pages that you have to turn.  Pages that you turn with anticipation, because you can’t wait to learn more about the story.  We need more bikes.  Not bikes that we have to ride to work to be better stewards of the environment.  While that’s a noble cause, we don’t need more of that.  What we need is more bikes that we ride with our children through a park on a Tuesday afternoon.  We need more orgasms.  Not sexy, sweet orgasms.  Hot, sticky orgasms.  Orgasms that come alone or with a partner.  We need orgasms that make us scream and don’t make us self-conscious.  We need more music.  Not the music that big labels tell us to listen to.  Music that touches our soul.  It doesn’t have to make us feel better.  It doesn’t have to make us feel worse.  We just need music that makes us feel something.  We need to feel MORE and WANT less. 

We deserve so much more than what we want.  It’s really easy to want a big house or a big car or a good job.  Those things are relative.  And what is making them relative is people like Chad and Jen from Building House.  Notice they didn’t call the show Building Home?  We all know the difference between a house and a home.  We also know the difference between what is good and what is shit.  So, why do we keep indulging in the shit, when what is good is so simple?  And, yes, I am aware that good is not a very intellectual adjective.  But maybe that’s another thing we don’t need MORE of.  Maybe we need less perceived intelligence and more actual smart.  Less bullshit, more reality.

 

-Inner Peas