dear death: and other thoughts

the wallet

Do vegans use plastic wallets?

Paper? Duct tape?

Would I use any other wallet aside from a leather one if I wasn't such a lazy, taciturn consumer?

Example: if my mother hadn't come home from a quick, not-going-to-spend-money-just-looking shopping spree and handed me the freshly packaged, oak-brown, bifold—would I have chosen it for myself?

It's a peach fuzz leather. Soft. The way touching your cheek feels, rolling a bent finger down your chin, brushing the irregular valleys of a knuckle through the fine hairs that grow there. I imagine it would be a different feel for a man. Rougher—like caressing the dimpled tarmac. But maybe a boy could understand? Stroking the smooth, imperfect angles, watching the mirror and wondering when the barbed forest his father has will sprout on his face, too.

Girls aren't allowed to have beards.

But if we were, would I keep mine?

How much of my life is predetermined by society? Ideas, expectations, beliefs. Implanted seedling-thoughts that erupt in the fresh, undisturbed soil of a newborn child, wrapping vines around the tender shoots called personality, individuality, expression. Am I me? Or was the future me strangled from existence ages before I knew words? Are my choices mine? Or are my decisions simple by-products of a subversive environment where everything from recognizable product labels to mindless peer-on-peer interaction, guides me. I think I heard that soap-flake jingle in the womb.

Example: Friend X says red label cereal is better than blue. I've heard this, somewhere. I can't recall where—a commercial? A full-color ad in the Sunday Gazett?—but Friend X's statement is familiar. So I ponder it in front of the dimly lit supermarket shelf. Dime-store party favors, cheap vine fruit, hang from metal strips on either side of me. The primordial ooze stirs. And I choose the red label cereal because I know it as best. Did I ever try blue? Will I?

No.

And what about the green or yellow labels rushing toward the outdated? Stacked one after the other, unnoticed. Will I give them a try? Has anyone? Maybe expiration doesn't happen after the sell-by date. Maybe, through a series of multi-media events, it happens when the box is still brand new but not branded. Red is better than blue. And both are better than a color never printed in a mainstream ad. (So I think, or was I told?)

Manufacturing is a waste.

It's all the same goddamn cereal.

The wallet fits my palm. It's meant for me. Does it matter that 95% of the World's population have hands, hands that, on average, are the same width and shape as mine? I thank my mother and take the wallet. The money I didn't spend myself can go inside. I'm lazy. I'm cheap. Would I have chosen it myself?

A/N: shower thoughts, ya'll