Whip the world, I wanna get on

This is really important. It's about my big life change, so please read on if you care.

A year or so ago I walked down to the general store in my customary naked (feet) way and trod on a bee, which stung me as though I were some kind of right-winger. It was then and there that I decided to stop fighting for Nature and to vote conservative for the rest of my life. I'm serious. I've been too hip for too long. All those 35 wasted years of the activist life. Nothing but poverty and failed causes. What did that bastard bee care? Nature can go and root itself. I mean it.

There's more. About three weeks ago someone asked me if I wanted a can of whipped cream. I'm a very absent-minded person -- no, Zippy the Pinhead is a very absent-minded person, I'm far more developed than that -- so my mind was on other things in some other century or universe as usual and I didn't think too deeply about what was being offered, and I never, ever knock back anything free, so I muttered "Thanks". I didn't really know what they meant, but I usually don't know what people mean anyway so I thought nothing of it and neither did they because they're used to me, or trying hard to be.

Anyway, this kind person gave me a little box of goodies, like a half a dozen things that normal people have -- these folks were passing through town on their way home after holidays up the -- ecchhh!! -- Gold Coast (Pip bites wrist till blood trickles down arm) and had this bunch of food and stuff left over and they know I'm always a good candidate for a food parcel. When I got home I unpacked my goodies (it was like Consumer Christmas for my sad, rarely opened fridge) ... and there was the "can of whipped cream". It really caught my eye.

It was a can that you shake and hold upside down and you press this button and it sprays whipped cream out. Something an old hippie like me is as likely to purchase as a rocket grenade launcher or a Perry Como album.

Now, I'm not saying I have never bought an aerosol can in my life, because every now and then I find it necessary (or convenient) to throw my values to the wind and bring home a spray can of something to wage chemical warfare on cockroaches. (Guilt, but I'm trying to be normal here, as well as honest, so please cut me some slack.) And the concept of aerosol-impelled cream was not new to me, because I remember a mate of mine 20 years ago told me he used to get a free stone in supermarket aisles by inhaling the nitrous oxide from whipped cream spray cans. I never did it that way, I just used to buy the sparklet bulb thingies and do it in the safety of my own home.

But the actual product was not something I had ever noticed before. I'm your typical dirty-longhair-New Age-get-a-job-hippie-freek shopper: I don't shop. It's never even occurred to me to glance at one those catalogs they stuff in my letterbox before I put it in the recycle bin. I don't even know where they come from or what they're about. They could have rocket grenade launchers for all I know. It's not that I'm out of touch with Planet Consume, but I don't listen to commercial radio and the last time I watched television Hoss Cartwright was looking for a lost heifer in the lower forty. Whipped cream in aerosol cans? You've gotta be kidding. What next? Videotapes?

Anyway, I was your typical hippie shopper. Not any more, not since I tasted coffee topped with a mountain of thick, white frothy stuff from some factory somewhere, probably in China with slave labourers. Who gives a shit? Like I said, I'm going to vote conservative from now on and I'm going to support every planet-raping industry I can find in the Yellow Pages. Any food that is mined rather than grown, that's the one for me. I want foodstuffs that are extruded, not alive. From now on my food must be engineered, denatured, overpackaged, chemically enabled to keep at room temperature for weeks on end, and marketed by gonadally challenged men with huge mortgages and miniscule consciences. Yayy team!!

Man, I dig that whipped cream the most. For a couple of weeks I had whipped cream on my morning two cups of coffee. This is what Heaven is all about -- that must be why most Christians have that polyester aura. Don't look for me after the Rapture, baby. This makes it worthwhile to chuck out every damn principle I ever had. Vive whipped cream spray cans! The planet can go to hell in a handbasket for all I care. Screw koalas and mooses. Meese. Whatever. This is all about me! I really miss that whipped cream spray can and if I can force myself to go into a shopping mall I'm gonna get me some more. I want to be normal! I want to rent a prohibitively priced time-share apartment at the Gold Coast and get me a tan and some vacuous babe!

Tagged: sustainability, permaculture, organic, progressive, activism, food