Naked Reality

Many people use the expression "it's not worth my time" to denote that certain activities hold lower value than what they consider themselves to be worth. It's not worth it for me to buy used shirts on eBay and try to turn them around for a profit on the street. It's not worth the time for Bill Gates to pick up a hundred dollar bill on the street, because in the time it takes him to pick it up, he has already earned more than that in interest on his fortune. It's not worth it for someone with a high-school degree who has been fired from every job they've ever had to try to make an upward move in society. These things are "knowns", and we all recite this mantra to varying degrees in our lives.

But if something has worth, such as our time, then it must be a commodity. As such, if it has value, meaning it can be compared to other things and either accentuated or diluted, then while certain activities add value to it, others take value away. If you say that something isn't "worth your time", then there has to be a finite, specific sum on what your time is worth. A cut-off. What is your time worth? If it isn't worth a sum of say 10 American dollars an hour, is it worth 15? How about 20? And what if someone came to you and offered you 400 dollars an hour? Now you're doing something that is worth way more than your time. What then?

If that passage of time positively impacts your life, then there has to be a negative side, the part that takes away from your life.

I'm obsessed with the idea of 1 and 0, the idea of being vs. not being. If the color black exists, so must white. If heaven, then hell. You tell me that there exists justice, then there must be an injustice. Imbalance from balance, and all of that.

So I think it's not reaching if I say that being here, in the Land of the White Shadow, takes something away from us, draws something out from our energy, saps us of some undefinable resource. Simply by the act of breathing in this air, looking at this sky, talking to our neighbors, a small part of our enamel is chipped away. And what's beneath? Despair. The hopelessness that rots and breeds, it stinks its way out of the sewers and flows into our brains like poison gas.

And of course it's cyclical, and of course you can't say that one causes another. The Long White Shadow descends and pulls us down into it, and then we accept it and live with it, and then it's allowed to descend further, and so on.

The point of it all is that normally, we don't allow things that cause us pain to continue to cause us pain. If every day I woke up and someone slapped me in the face, I would take the steps to stop the slapping. But if the cold does it? It's tolerated.

Some of us wear it as a badge, stripes on our uniform of bravery. Some complain, but ultimately go back to crock pots. Most deal with it internally, a sort of soul-negotiation, setting arbitrary limits on what is worth what, and constantly keeping it at a distance. A small number flee to tolerable climates, which is really anywhere in America but here.

The reason it is so cold here is because we live in a bowl, mountains to our west and east, the long fingers of rivers snaking south into the flat plains. The air masses slide over the Rockies and come to rest over the Dakotas. Systems last for days, weeks even. There's something in there about temporary permanence, the idea that change will only happen when it's the right time. As progressive as we see ourselves, we tolerate an awful lot of old ways of doing things. It's not born into us, it's drilled. It's pummeled with every storm, every sub-zero snap, every icy morning.

The world is nothing but change, and we, its parts, fear it.

The slow beast moves on, time and value left to the fans of corn dogs, our vast system simply a network of loosely-connected, self-delusional cells. And what do we have to fight for?

Another day, another slap.