A Way to Spend a Saturday?

Storm coming up on Rattlesnake Ledge. 


The last few minutes of the day. 

I tried to get some pictures of the mountains today but the weather was pretty bad. I hiked up to Rattlesnake Ledge (top left in the first picture)with two dogs. Just as we got to the top we could hear thunder. I wasn't lookig to get quick-fried so we headed down immediately. My quote of the day: "I like hiking in the rain better than the normal non-rain." We got thoroughly drenched but I hid a tallboy in a stream at the bottom by the car. Nothing like a stream-cold beer after a six mile hike. We left the soaking wet dogs in the car while we got a bite to eat in North Bend, Washington which lies at the foot of Mount Si. The dogs stunk up the car to high heaven which didn't seem to bother them one bit. I had to drive home in the rain with the sun roof open just to be able to breath.

The Space Needle shot shows that Seattle has the best light at dusk, just before the sun drops below the Olympic Mountains.


THE PRICE IS RIGHT

You work to earn money. You earn money to pay for a place to live and food. All of the money you have left over after that you use to buy stuff. This is supposed to be the fun part; this is supposed to be the pay-off for hard work and toil. For a lot of people buying the stuff is more fun than the actual stuff. They will tell stories years from now about how they found that in a little shop in Tucson, that it was on sale—half price!

It is too easy to pick on malls but let’s take a look at malls. Malls are like amusement parks for people who like to shop. For people who don’t like to shop malls are like hell, but they aren’t built for people who don’t like to shop. They are built for people who love nothing more than shopping. Some people like to just go to malls and walk around and pretend like they are shopping. I would personally rather go walk around a cemetery and pretend that I am dead. I would rather go to a hospital and pretend I have cancer.

Like I said, malls weren’t built for people who equate shopping with cancer and death; they are built for people who equate shopping with dreaming and living. A young girl buys a cute top and day dreams about wearing it on an episode of Friends. A woman buys a Persian rug and dreams about the day the President and the First Lady come over for coffee or whatever it is people dream about when they are buying stuff. About the only thing that goes through my mind when I shop is, “Is it humanly possible for me to live without this?” If the answer is ‘yes’ then I leave it on the shelf. I guess you could say that I’m not a dreamer.

Speaking of dreams, there is a show on TV called The Price is Right. I mention this for any of you who may not have ever been to this country or for those of you who have been trapped in a coal mine for the past 30 odd years. On the show people from the audience get on stage and the cryogenically-preserved host, Bob Barker, asks the contestants to guess the price of a bunch of household products like washing machines and thoroughly tasteless living room furniture. The one who guesses closest wins. I know it sounds stupid but what do we know? Have you had a show on TV since the Nixon administration?

This show is to consumerism what the New Testament is to Christianity; it is the Koran of shopping. I would put forth that if there were a show on TV where contestants had to answer questions about the Bible, not only would it not be popular but not many people could answer correctly. People are good at guessing the price of stuff, people are fucking uncanny at knowing what stuff costs. Not every America shopper makes it on The Price is Right but you will see millions and millions of them out training for the show at the local mall. In a nation that is becoming progressively more fundamentalist Christian, malls draw bigger crowds than churches. I don’t know what to make of that. I’m not too comfortable in churches or malls. I don’t know what to make of that. If shopping is our secular religion then I am still an atheist.

I would have an easier time guessing people’s weight at the circus than trying to put a price on an end table or a clothes dryer. I could better guess the circumference of the earth than the price of a lawn mower. I don’t have a thick green lawn even though I have been told repeatedly to get one. I haven’t answered the tidal wave of e-mails I receive every day that promise I can have a bigger you-name-it. Evidently what I have isn’t big enough or at least it could be bigger, which is always better.