Wrap

Sometimes I wonder how bankrupted our culture is, how we do things in such morbid repitition and succession that we don't even know how we arrived there. I could make a list, and check it twice, of things that we do oh so carelessly and without an extra thought, but looking back I have no idea why we did it that particular way.

Like wrapping presents in gold and glitter and silver and little stamped Santa Clauses. Maybe this whole idea is an easy fix for everyone else, easy to see, to understand, but I look around and try to decide which paper marketing genius designed an advertising campaign to help sell his particular brand of colored paper. We are driven so much by so many different chauffers and I really don't like society taking the wheel. Well not society, but some suit or some driving force behind the next big fashion trend, the next big consumer goldmine. Here we are using and discarding at will, at an ease. And I sit here with my nice computer with my decent clothes and fashionable shoes watching my words over my shoulder. My Razor phone sits beside me.

But why? What use are these things? Because someone told us they are, because somewhere we heard that we would be cool if we did this? I don't know, I really don't. There are too many stimuli when it comes down to it. We are inundated with so many schemes that it's almost overload. When you dream about movie scenes or product placement or something that is not real, not physical, just celluloid, or cellular, or cellophane. Most of this world is a pipedream envisioned by some amazing chess player that lives in a high rise, soaking in millions watching us buy his products that ultimately do not change who we are, not beyond its thin application of base on our skin.

Now, I believe there is delicateness in this chaos, there is purpose in all this social perdition.

But wrapping paper? To decorate a gift? to beautify something that is already beautiful, giving, putting your money where you mouth is at Christmas time, sacrificing greed for (hopefully) selfless giving. A present needs no bow, nor foil or anything else. It is displayed in full glory carefully sleeping in that box. I wrapped a present with newspaper this year, and scotch tape, just to prove a point that sometimes the boxes of the world only hide the beauty that is inside. However poor the container, what lies inside is always the treasure.

And what sits inside my paper treasure chest? A pair of sunglasses for a friend.

Wow, I am so sacrificial.