Butterfly crocs. Image: Tedd Siegel, 2021.
My Butterfly Croc Fetish
Because I am appalled that people are willing to die to protect the so-called free market, I am just now writing a blog article on abstract labor, the commodity form, and structural social domination.
I am very clever, because I can almost understand Moishe Postone’s re-reading of the 1844 Manuscripts and Grundrisse from the perspective of Das Capital.
But I am also frustrated, because my broadband connection went down a week ago, and ATT are a bunch of swine who don’t care that I now order all my food online, and I keep confusing reification and hypostatization, and I can’t look anything up.
Also, even though I live close to Silicon Valley, my house has been in an unresolved service dip for 20 years, so the cell phones require an Internet boost in order to function at the house.
Maybe you are wondering why I don’t have a landline, then. Silly rabbit, tricks are for kids!
About two years ago, ATT quietly replaced my landline with VoIP, without even telling me! My landline just drove around all night in a nineteen fifties sedan, and when it could no longer stay awake, and fell asleep, it emerged from an alien pod by the side of the road, claiming to still be my landline, but it wasn’t, because it had been body-snatched.
Until this sudden loss of service (is it the modem or the line side? Something else?) I think I was coping pretty well with the new monastic existence. I don’t go out except to run, ride the bike, or walk the dog, all during off hours.
Over the last week without connectivity, however, I started to feel really butt-hurt. No phone chats. No web music on Youtube. No news and podcasts, no checking Johns Hopkins coronavirus map. No Zoom cocktails.
It’s ok, I said to myself, just focus on your writing and the gardening, etc. Just get up in the morning, put on your floppy hat and your butterfly crocs, and go out and work in the yard. What’s one more entitlement deprivation anyway? Its good for neuro-plasticity, good for the Zen practice.
But the right croc is missing. Oh no, she has it!
She is out back on the hillside, eating the neoprene strap. Neoprene is her crack cocaine, I know this. What was I thinking? For months, I ritualized putting them away so that she couldn’t get them. But then I made one mistake.
It’s the same with COVID-19, really. You have to stay vigilant. Just one mistake is one too many.
This is the fucking last straw. So I run out in the backyard barefoot and in my underwear, and I am furious. She sees me, her ice-blue husky eyes flash, and she picks up the shoe, and she is off and running her crazy laps around the yard.
Now I am behaving like an enraged silverback gorilla. I am picking up sticks and throwing them back down on the ground. I am waving my long hairy arms back and forth. This is not a game! How much plastic did she actually swallow? I can’t even look it up or call the vet. It will probably come out the other end ok. If either M and I fall suddenly sick with COVID, we now have to drive two miles just to get a couple of bars on the phone in order to call an ambulance.
Also, those crocs made me happy. I liked that they were gender nonconforming. The gender-nonconforming, post-professional gardener, that’s what I was channeling. Those crocs represented my successful retirement transition. Now they are taken from me. I can’t order new ones because I have no internet connection. I probably shouldn’t anyway, because she is fifteen months old, and will probably try to eat them again.
I sit with Tasha and cuddle with her for a while, and tell her that I’m sorry about my commodity fetishism. I tell her that she is much more important to me than some stupid plastic shoes, and that I should learn to stop investing stupid things with intrinsic value, and stop worshiping capitalism’s dead idols.
