Well, it’s mid-morning.. if Sunday afternoon is the long, dark tea-time of the soul I have entered the eternal blackness that is Tuesday’s morning tea. It’s like the long dark tea time of the soul except you’re sleepier and you have something you should be doing, you just really, really don’t want to.

it’s ok, I know what I need to get done today and I’m all over it, like Mamma Cass on a ham sandwich (thankyou Kate for the vivid image!)

Speaking of Mamma Cass, obesity continues to rise. That isn’t actually an article I’ve been reading, just something I found spur of the moment to support a conversation I’ve had recently - they aren’t hard to find, it’s been alarming news for the last decade or more.

For such a socially unacceptable, stigmatised, and reviled disability, more and more people are joining the ranks of the morbidly obese. It carries all the health risks of smoking which I don’t believe should be medicare rebatable. That is to say, if you turned 18 after, lets say, 1990 I’m assuming you knew the health risks and started smoking regardless. Ergo, I’m not paying for your fucking chemo, moron, that shit’s expensive and the health system is imploding under the combined weight of your kindred idiots. (I know, you took it up to lose weight, didn’t you? I think that’ll work out for you nicely, genius. cancer chic.)

And yet in the case of obesity I’m reluctant to blame the individual outright. Someone chooses to eat badly, just as they choose to light up a cigarette, so why doesn’t my (perhaps slightly harsh) healthcare views and general disdain extend to this group? I think I worked it out - really, it’s like any other form of overconsumption set up by the priciples of capitalism.

We have a society built on the principles of selling - food, cars, whatever to each other to make a living. So we have people who’s entire lives revolve around selling food - and their job is to sell as much as possible, at the highest markup possible, (which usually means using the crappest ingredients you can. Macca’s, anyone?)

Lets just think about the old phrase ‘can sell ice to eskimos’, one of the catchcries of capatilist dogma. But no one seems to give a shit the eskimos are getting screwed. Since when did they need ice? So we to have a society based around selling shit people don’t need in quantities far in excess of what they can use, and we wonder why people are getting fat? We are the goddamn eskimos. If eating way too much was bad for your bones, or some other invisible disease, we’d all have it. I would shudder for the world if overconsumption wasn’t marked by a disease so visible, and held in such contempt, as obesity. We’re a plague of locusts held in check only by our failing biology, and even so we’re still destroying everything in our path.

Marketers, corperations and even the government would have us shovelling incredible amounts of food down our gullets, to promote industry and ‘create jobs’. The world really has enough problems for all of us to work hard on solving them for the rest of our lives without needing to ‘create jobs’. It’s the artificial motivator, commerce, that seems to decide what’s worth doing. If you can fill an immediate, convenient and marketable nieche for the rich, that’s worth doing. No one bothers, or can even afford to care about, the things that really need doing but don’t tickle the wealthy individual’s pleasure centres quite enough.

I think it’s just another example of how our society has sacrificed any sense of scale or priority - how the massive social network of earth is made stupid by it’s billions of parts acting only to gratify their short term wants in ever-shinyer and well-packaged ways, while we can’t even save ourselves.

Yes, fat people, you are exonerated to some extent. On the other hand, if you’re in marketing, you should kill yourself.

“Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.” - Santayana
(ripped off some guys slashdot posting)

“An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do” - Dylan Thomas
(found on wikipedia while indulging in the ultimate in ego-centric social masturbation, checking my google rank. Sadly Dylan Thomas still seems to be the more important ‘Dylan’.)