The Cult Of Things

Today as I sat at the kitchen table and stared out at the beauty out my window I realized how different my value system is from that of many people. You really can't buy what I saw today. It's not for sale. It's a piece of nature that is available to anyone who wants to take the time to sit and stare and let it in. I rent the house, but the view is free. I often enjoy watching others stop on the street below the house just to take in the beauty. If we see each other we wave. If not, we just enjoy it in our own private front row seat, just us, the solitude, and the perfection of nature.

And yet, such amazing and profound beauty matters little to others. Because it has no admission charge, because they can't outbid someone for it, because they can't hold it in their hand and show it off to someone,  it has little or no value to them.  They are people of things and it is not a thing unless they can own it, log it, strip it, mine it, make it something that becomes a commodity. Then it has value to them.

How messed up is that? So messed up that it's at the root of the illness facing this country right now. People no longer learn for the sake of learning. They learn enough to qualify for the job that will allow them to buy things. They no longer buy a house to live in. They buy a house to show off, to claim status above someone else. They live in a commodity instead of a home and wonder why it feels so empty. A car is not something that takes you out of the madness of the city and into the peace and quiet of nature. It is a status symbol to impress people who at the heart of it, don't really give a crap about you anyway.

Right now a very large part of this country is caught up in the thing trap. They vote against their own interests because the people with all the things have convinced them if they vote for them they will also have things, and we all know that the more things, the happier one will be.

Except it's a lie. I've seen people who should know better, and many who once did, get caught in the cult of things. They amass housefuls of things. They have to rent storage units to store all those things. They build extra rooms in their houses for those things. They live in a timid little crouch of approval-seeking misery in their massive piles of junk they bought believing one day they would reach critical happiness mass.

But they never do. They never find that happiness because it's not in things. It's in those around us, in the love we share with each other, in the meals we sit down together and form memories around.

It is not getting up each morning caught in the trap of things. It is not buying something to impress someone rather than for your own pleasure. Has it ever occurred to these accumulation fanatics that the people they are trying to impress either don't even know they exist, or they are frantically buying their own things to impress someone, too?

I suspect we went so wrong when advertising became non-stop indoctrination selling us underwear, toilet paper, and politicians. It wasn't enough to watch sports. You had to wear your team. It wasn't enough to enjoy a certain type of music or performer. You had to buy all the trappings to turn that admiration into cult status.

Advertising makes us think we were worthless, uncool, out of touch, unless we have whatever is  being shoved at us through the TV screen. And it's made worse by the whole consumer mentality we have to deal with in high school, college, and whatever job we end up with that enables us to buy things.

When did we stop learning that what matters most in life is not things, but love and friendship and the beauty of nature? When did we start judging each other for not having things, money, the right travel destinations, the best gifts, the most prime seat at the table in the most expensive restaurant? When did we start ending friendships, relationships, life-long dreams because they had no monetary value, they couldn't do anything for our career, they conflicted with the expectations of those who had the things we wanted to have for ourselves?

I think we've been played for fools. We have poor people judging those who have even less. We have clubs devoted to nothing but buying more things and if you're not a member of that club, you have no value. We have so many things but no compassion anymore. Most of us could probably feed a  hungry family for a month if we sold just the things we have stored that we never use.

But no, we have to keep those closets crammed full. We have to have that house, that car, those clothes, that membership, that gated community, that job because face it, we lost our souls a long time ago and those things are a last desperate attempt to prove we haven't.

So we pop our happy pills, drink our booze, smoke our weed, and make that plastic credit card scream to keep the facade alive. We hide behind out pile of things and say look at me, I have all this stuff! I'm so frigging happy!

Except the happiness doesn't come from inside you. It doesn't let you gaze upon the beauty of a piece of nature that belongs to all who set eyes on it, and not just you, not some rich asshole, not some greedy jerk who wants to fence it all off for himself. And until you realize that, your happiness will be temporary. It will be artificial. And it will be incredibly lonely because you can't buy what you really need.

I've never given a damn about things, which is why I have just what I need, and most importantly, why I've lived the majority of my life on my own terms with my own choice of friends and loved ones to share it with me. I grew up in Las Vegas, the town of things. There's nothing that money can't buy. You can impress anyone with anything as long as they are more miserable and empty than you. But a truly happy person, well, we're not for sale.

The Cult Of Things

And so it ends again...

When someone decides to go for a motorcycle ride in the middle of the night after spending the last five years trying to drink himself to death, does it really qualify as an accident or is it just suicide by another name? And when you add various substances said motorcycle rider probably injested as well because he learned a long time ago that after alcohol doesn't really numb the pain of too many wounds on the soul, the question becomes more complicated.

It's that complicated thing I'm dealing with right now. I want to be angry at him. I want to be sad over him. I want him to still be alive but I also feel the truth of that stupid and trite saying "he's now at peace." I hate saying that. I hate feeling it because it really explains so little.

He told me suicide ran in his family a couple weeks after we scattered his sister's ashes in 1990. She was my friend and I tried to save her. I was young and foolish then. I really did believe people could be saved from themselves. Anna proved me wrong. She showed me that sometimes salvation is taking yourself out of the picture of human life. It took me a long time to forgive her but I finally did. I haven't changed my mind that suicide is the most stupid and selfish thing you can do to those who love you, but I forgave her. Mostly because her brother asked me to.

He had a kind soul. A very deep and vulnerable soul. He had the kind of openness that people zero in on and immediately find a way to take advantage of it. We had that in common and we exchanged many mournful and supportive emails over the years on how people needed to come up to our level and not force us to sink down to theirs. We wrote each other and said be strong, hang on to your principles, be a person of integrity and compassion, even if others are not, even if others use all that in your for their own purposes. We assured each other the occasional using was worth the good we could do in the world just by staying kind, compassionate, caring, and strong.

Ryan was a lot more optimistic about it than I was. Often he was the one who wrote me and begged me not to give up, not to isolate myself, not to run away from people who were mean and selfish, that I had to let them see the other side of life, even if it hurt and cost me a few pieces of skin. "Skin is ego," he was fond of saying, "and road rash is humility."

But in the end it was he who suffered over what the rest of the world did. He was not the type of person to stand back in silence when wrong was being done. He spent most of his considerable fortune helping others, mostly children in countries torn apart by war. He had a soft spot for the innocent victims in everything and he spent his life saving them.

But in the end, he simply felt too much. I read the downhill slide in his ever more infrequent emails. Where once there was hope and optimism there was far too often despair and depression. He took far too many drugs to cope with what he could no longer face. His nightmares took over his days. I often wondered how far it would go before he killed himself.

I always thought it would be by something clean and efficient, an overdose from the many bottles available. A staged and dramatic setting that wouldn't  inconvenience anyone too much. He didn't want to leave a mess for someone else to clean up.

A couple weeks ago he wrote me a rambling email that covered much of his life. I remembered thinking it was the kind of thing one wrote after drinking all the alcohol in the house, swallowing the pills, and typing furiously before it all kicked in.

It was probably that way. But it was a beautiful night out. The moon was full. And the road called to him, the winding mountain road in a northern Italian setting. I imagine it was beautiful. I imagine there was a moment of elation, a moment of fear, of sadness, a thought of those like me who would be hurt. But his pain was too strong and the night too beautiful and he knew I would forgive him.

Right now I'm not sure. It's only been a week. I still think of him in present time. I still want to write and talk him out of it. I want to leap through time and take his keys away. But Anna taught me such things wouldn't change a thing and my only option was forgiveness.

Maybe that is the story of my life. Maybe that is what he left me with, that often in life the only option we are left with is forgiveness. I have to accept that for now.

And so it ends again...