Ammon Brown

And now, the much anticipated “Too much crap in the house” rant. We went to that mecca of uniform consumerism, IKEA today. Two hundred dollars later, we had a new computer desk, a new bookshelf, some sotrage boxes, and some other assorted odds and ends. All said and done, it was a fairly inexpensive trip. However, once we got home, we had to set the thing up. This led to reorganizing. This led to some serious housecleaning. We threw out so much crap. We seem to have duplicates of everything. Two pairs of scissors, two discmans (discmen?), dozens of picture frames, and so on. We also have specialized appliances for making rice, one for making toasties, we have a crockpot, a foreman grill (two of them), and multiple teapots. We have more picture frames than we have level space in the apartment, we have too many flashlights that do not work, and we have random sports equipment that has been used once. As we were weeding through this crap, it occurred to me… this is why the terrorists hate us. More specifically, me. I think if they saw the wastefulness and relative luxury in which I reside, they would point me out as a prime example of why Americans are a hedonistic people who squander the resources of others. Hell, they feed our appetite for oil only to see us drive the new Hummer H2 and waste a gallon of the resources they pump every 13 miles. They feed our addiction not as the drug dealer, happy to see us coming back, but as the workers at the methadone clinic, knowing that it is killing us and thinking us to be pathetic for being so hopelessly fiendish for a fix. OK, so I don’t own a car, but the analogy holds. These dirtbags who want to kill us have every right to call us dirtbags. We waste things and consume resources at a rate of two foreman grills per year. yikes.