CProbes

That there is my Christmas tree. Spent about 20 minutes a day for a week decorating it, often one or two icicles at a time. An enjoyable way to take breaks from essay writing, I have to say. On the top is a styrofoam mannequin head with strings of lights around it, so, yes, you could call it a crown of lights if not thorns, so that, yes again, I’m combining Christmas and Easter into one little orgy of birth, death, and some wonderful Warhol-esque cans of Stiegl. But enough of about my tree…

Today I went to pick up a sweater in the midst of that other orgy we know as Boxing Day. It seems to be nothing if not the very materialization of the superego Baudrillard talks about in one of his early essays on consumerism. At no other time is the pressure to shop so acute. So much value! The jouissance of shopping is to a great extent eliminated; all one feels is the enjoinment. I wonder why people do it. I wonder if people in a sense identify with this very superegotistical force, perhaps, at one moment or two, thereby suspending its very enjoinment. Probably not. At the very moment when its force is most felt, they probably just escape into the subways with their thrifty purchases. Still, rather than just pooh-pooh it as ‘another indication of our consumerist mindset’, I’d like to keep open the chance that it might, just might, open up another dimension…