I just had an experience the other day that reminded me of this again, plus just finished a book by Neal Stephenson called Anathem that deals in general with the same subject; so since I haven't updated this main personal site of mine in awhile, I thought I would dedicate some time this week to finally getting these loose thoughts in my head dedicated to paper (er, "paper")...

For those who don't know, I essentially live underneath America's poverty line (I make less than $10,000 a year); which I don't mind since it's in the service of trying to grow my arts center as quickly as I possibly can, but that has definitely had me living an ultra-frugal lifestyle for at least the last seven years, which is the last time I held a full-time salaried position in the corporate world. In fact, what has turned into one of my favorite pastimes of all is a deceptively simple thing, almost monk-like in its austerity, which like I said I just got to pleasantly experience again a few days ago: of simply running errands in my neighborhood on a warm day while having my iPod strapped on, listening for the first time to the fully finished version of the latest episode of my arts center's podcast, with just enough spare money on me for maybe a cup of coffee or pint of beer halfway through, but otherwise simply enjoying the sensation of being a creative, morally consistent human being, out existing in the universe, in a city I love on a day I love surrounded by other sexy creative people everywhere I turn.

And why I do I love listening to new podcast episodes under such circumstances? Oh, well, because the podcast gives me a sense of accomplishment that my web-based book reviews simply don't, a sense of something that was begun, executed and finished, and that now exists in a "physical" form that one can own and swap and remove from the digital world altogether if they want, and transfer to the physical world via mobile MP3 player. Actually editing these episodes is a tiresome, piecemeal process; so I love having a chance to simply download the finished thing through the podcast's RSS feed just like everyone else when the whole process is over. It provides a sense of completeness, a sense of closure to the project, that nothing else currently with CCLaP does; a sense of, "Hey, I did that. That's a cool thing, a thing that now exists in the world and makes the world a tiny bit better of a place; and I made that thing that makes the world a tiny bit better of a place." And like I said, although I anticipate feeling the same about CCLaP's eventual physical books, classes, live events and the like, currently there's almost nothing else regarding the website besides the podcast that gives me this feeling, especially when combined with a warm day and a great neighborhood full of good-looking busy people.

In fact, the monk metaphor is actually quite apt through and through regarding how I seem to be feeling about life these days; because believe me, when you can't afford to participate in even the most basic consumerist events in the United States (I've been to a movie theatre once in the last year, have gone out to eat in restaurants twice, haven't seen a single live band or visited a single museum), whether or not you want you learn how to appreciate the ultra-simple things in life, things like well-tested muscles in a middle-aged body, like a cold pint of beer on a warm spring day. And what you come to realize like I have in the last half-decade is that the entire subject of "happiness" is ultimately a relative one; that as it's seemingly taught to us over and over and over (most recently in the huge Danny Boyle hit Slumdog Millionaire), being happy isn't about achieving some outwardly defined objective state, but rather finding a relative state within whatever life one lives, a state where we are stress-free and one with the natural universe for a moment as it exists around us, no matter how the actual trappings of that stress-free moment correspond to certain actual dollar amounts from person to person around the world.

In fact, it seems that a whole lot of Americans these days are in serious desire of this lesson; as it's becoming clearer and clearer during this "Great Recession" of ours, in fact, just like the Soviet Union in the '80s, the US economy in the '90s and '00s seems now to have been falsely held together through a fake front, except in America's case through the shiny veneer of conspicuous consumer consumption (or just "consumerism"), of elevating the concept of "Keeping Up With The Joneses" to a level where it could literally generate billions of dollars of revenue. It's a hard thing to get across to those in other countries, but by the time of, say, Bill Clinton's impeachment in 2000, we really did reach a point here in the US where consumerism had become a legitimate lifestyle; an age where we were taught to no longer even question celebrity worship, where there seemed to literally be no limit to the number of cable stations and glossy magazines and mall multiplexes that could be created and become financially soluble, all of them serving up the same exact warmed-over crap over and over, the point no longer anymore to even enjoy the arts in the first place but merely to have an excuse to exchange the money needed to keep our late-capitalist (a.k.a. "post-Industrial") society actually running. And thus did it suddenly cost $200 per person to see a rock band in concert; and thus did it suddenly cost ten dollars per person to see a two-hour movie; and thus did every corporation on the planet suddenly become experts at gnawing away and gnawing away at customer benefits at every corner, in an attempt to become as financially efficient as humanly possible. ("Removing three peanuts per bag saves airlines seven million dollars a year! Why provide customer service to everyone for free, when you can call it a 'premium service' and convince a certain amount of them to pay even more!")

IT WORE AMERICANS OUT, and to a lesser extent Western Europeans; and it's no coincidence that the Bush years of the early 2000s saw the rise of "Girls Gone Wild," hate porn, corrupt politician after corrupt politician after corrupt politician, a weary brain-dead populace happy to accede to any crazy cartoonish villainy the Bush Regime could even conjure up, all of it sold to the throughly worn-out brainwashed masses through the exact ultra-sophisticated Postmodern-Age advertising industry that sold them on the idea of consumerism-as-lifestyle in the first place. Jesus Christ, no wonder our country became such a fucking mess for awhile. And now there are tens of millions of Americans who are crying out for something else, which is the whole way we got Obama in the first place; crying for something real, for something substantial, for a way to be happy that doesn't involve slaving oneself to death in an absurdist, Kafkaesque office environment, in order to afford the thousands spent per year on empty, unsatisfying, prettily prepackaged "Corporate Approved Authentic Experiences," trained to vent their frustration over it all through TMZ-produced "Hate Hours," where the audience is encouraged to despise and attack the very celebrities they've been brainwashed into handing their money over to by the thousands in the first place. Jesus Christ.

And thus do we arrive at the conclusion I've been making over the last several years too; that happiness is a state of mind, a place we can take ourselves to no matter what we're doing or how much money is coming in and out of our lives at that moment. And I don't think it's any coincidence that so many people are re-examining their religious beliefs these days in the US as well, and by the millions turning away from the hateful Evangelism of the '80s and '90s, to the more inclusive Moody and Osteen style of Christianity suddenly so popular in this Obamian Age. Because although it didn't start this way when first invented in the early 1900s, the Evangelical movement has ended up becoming colluders and collaborators with this all-pervasive amoral consumerist lifestyle juggernaut machine I've been talking about; note for example how by the early 2000s and the Bush Years, most conservative Christians were being taught to actively ignore the obvious hypocrisy that comes with religious people supporting aggressive, unjustified wars, in that support of such wars was the only way to continue holding together the Cold-War-Era military-industrial complex and resulting consumerist lifestyle, thus keeping the nation ticking along for a few more years in the pampered, resources-wasting, McMansion-filled way we had become accustomed to living.

Those In Charge were able to perpetuate this intellectually bankrupt idea for a long time after it became economically terrible; but something about the Bush Era, the endless human indignities our government perpetuated in those years, the endless worship of the Britney Spears of the world, finally started spelling the death-knell for late-capitalist consumerism-as-lifestyle, and now suddenly we're in a period where both theists and atheists are yearning, searching, for something more, for something that really matters. It's what I think about every time I go on one of my little springtime afternoons of errands and podcast-listening; of how simple a good life can be if one merely chooses to make it so, of how easy it is to reject all this late-capitalist consumerism if one merely concentrates on noticing how such a thing subtly manipulates their day-to-day existence. I'm convinced that it's going to spell a profound change to our society, to the relationship between Western and Eastern Civilizations, to the role that both religion and rationality will play in our daily lives; how strange and pleasurable that I should come to understand all this simply because of being broke all the time these days, and of being forced into a post-consumerist lifestyle whether I wanted it or not.