I’ll allow you to draw your own conclusions.

Update: Point of clarification: By “diet,” I mean “what one eats” and not some plan at weight loss.

Twenty years ago I met the most amazing woman of my life.

The poor thing has been putting up with my eccentricities ever since.

The first time I read Walden by Thoreau, I was taken with the simplicity of his diet in the woods.

In addition, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about life in a pre-industrial (actually post-industrial) world. I am obsessed with simplifying and reducing the role of big corporations in my life.

Then I read somewhere (sorry I forget where) about someone eating oatmeal for breakfast, greens for lunch, and beans and rice for dinner.

So I’m modifying that. Right now it’s the same but homemade bread and natural peanut butter for lunch.

I’m looking into making my own peanut butter.

You may have noticed that this is vegetarian. This is by happenstance, not by design.

I don’t have a plan for duration. And I’m not a zealot. I teach a graduate class on Tuesday nights, so I had a vegetarian burrito at Freebird’s tonight.

But I want to understand what it’s like to subsist on staples. So this is an exploration. It’s a journey. Not the destination.

One day I will wake up and be done with this exploration. All I know is that it’s not tomorrow.

Notable exceptions aside, many of our species’ greatest travesties owe their genesis to good intentions.

The road to hell, and what not.

Suburbia – more specifically urban sprawl – represents one of America’s greatest unintended failures.

Walkable cities

Two family members live in a mid-sized European city close to the city center. Although I’ve neither been there nor inquired about the rent, I’ll wager that the apartment is both small and pricey compared to the average American suburban tract home.

However, there’s one key difference: six different bakeries lie within walking distance. SIX!

And with the bakeries come every other sort of small merchandiser.

You don’t need a vehicle to subsist.

In America – even in relatively contained Lubbock – that does not exist. Even here, roofs stretch to the horizon. Land is plentiful in West Texas (and a neighborhood near you), so we grow horizontally rather than vertically.

We insist on everything cheaper, so nothing is local, and everything stretches farther away into an even bigger Big Box.

Sustainability

The trouble is that suburbia is among the least sustainable endeavors undertaken by this species.

Remove cheap energy (i.e., oil), and suburbia transforms to a ghost town.

As a lark, I walked to the nearest grocery store – a Wal-Mart.

This sojourn drips with sick irony, as Wal-Mart burned out our city centers like economic napalm.

In the name of a cheaper toaster, your small to mid-sized town no longer has an economic center.

I digress.

Suburban hiking

No sidewalk makes the entire trip to Wal-Mart. So one contends with either vehicular traffic, or on this particular day, the muddy remnants of a winter snowstorm. Not exactly a pleasant shopping trip.

This is also the nearest place to catch public transit. Hence, should I decide to park the vehicle in lieu of mass transit, this would be the daily commute.

Rain, infrequent snow, or omnipresent wind included.

It’s my fault that I live in suburbia. Its siren’s song lured my family like so much of America. Now we’re trapped, and energy prices are poised to resume their northward climb.

So we’ll cling to our faux-country homes at the far fringes of our gutted cities that are anything but walkable – woefully prepared for a world post cheap oil.

But that’s a story and a photo for another day.

Counting on the stock market for your future is increasingly risky these days.

Market volatility drives consumers to safer investments, including precious metals. If General Motors goes out-of-business, your stock is worthless. But gold is still gold, and it has an intrinsic value.

Being a professor, I cannot afford gold. The current up-to-the-moment spot price on gold is $1,130.10 per ounce.

Ouch.

The spot price for silver is $18.25 per ounce at this moment. That I can afford. Hence, this silver eagle and this Buffalo nickle-inspired round represent my initial investment. These “generic” one ounce .999 silver rounds were purchased for $1.50 and $2 above spot. If I can cull together $1,000, it’s sales tax free in Texas!

Check out silver spot prices at Kitco.

However, when I saw James Howard Kunstler on The Colbert Report (it could have been The Daily Show) several months ago, I was intrigued by his book, World Made by Hand.

It’s a fictional portrayal of life after oil. And the potential wars that follow falling off of Hubbert’s Peak.

It was a great book, and I highly recommend it. I’ve now ordered The Long Emergency, the nonfiction book Kunstler wrote about the topic before World Made by Hand.

In the meantime, however, I may have to visit my father for some wordworking lessons. Somehow the World Made by Hand seems far more likely than I ever imagined.

Yet I cannot find a single redeeming feature of this shopping extravaganza. Instead, Black Friday seems to be a sociological and economic case study in exposing every single weakness of an unrestrained marketplace.

No Holds Barred

Competition is a good thing, except when it isn’t. And today is a testament to when it isn’t.

Life should be about friends and family. We spend too much time at work. Recall the old adage that no one on their death bed says, “I wish I spent more time at the office.”

We get too few vacation days and holidays. America ranks among the lowest in the western world in this regard.

And the Friday after Thanksgiving is one of those rare days where many of us don’t have to punch a time clock.

Freedom to Shop

Unfortunately in a Democracy – of which I am an enthusiastic fan – there is no one to save us from ourselves.

In truth, no business should be open today. Hospitals, nursing homes, and the occasional convenience store should be open. There’s just no reason for any other person to be at work.

Yet here we see the ugly underbelly. We idolize Democracy for notions of freedom and liberty, but when paired with nearly unrestrained capitalism, it represents little more than unchecked keeping up with the Joneses.

Who Shops at 4 a.m.?

It would be downright un-American to require retailers to shutter their doors today. So they have their choice. And they could choose to open at a respectable time, say 10 a.m.

But therein lies the rub. If everyone opened at 10 a.m., then one clever retailer would open at 9:30 a.m. And so on. It continues to the infinite regress that now has people lined up around the block to get into doors at 4 a.m.

This is ludicrous.

For what? Curing cancer?

Friends and … Sears?

Of course not. We eschew family time – and obligate countless retail employees to do the same – simply so that we can have a slightly larger television.

Almost nothing of consequence will be purchased today.

And this unrestrained competition does not stop in early one-upmanship.

Instead lawyers compete to rig the deal as much as possible and write the most unethical—yet legal—fine print possible.

One Available at This Price

Those doorbuster prices lure you through the door are backed by extremely limited quantities and no rain checks.

This brings out the absolute worst in people. Jokes are flying around the Internet about the most caustic thing to say as you wrestle the last Blu-ray from the arms of another customer.

For what? To save $20 on something you could have ordered from your living room and had delivered to your door?

Absurd.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Deals

This is the time of year when my thoughts turn to Thoreau, and I desire to live a more Walden-like life.

Sure, I usually fall short.

But there’s a lot of poetry in that little cabin by the pond. And there’s no poetry in fighting with an old woman over a $197 laptop.

We cannot be saved from ourselves, I realize. Hence this post is largely an exercise in futility.

To quote Aerosmith, “There’s somethin’ wrong with the world today I don’t know what it is.”