On a typical winter day the valley of the saints is swathed in a thick gray blanket woven from the contents of our collective To Do lists. Most residents call it smog. The grandiloquent weatherman calls it particulate matter. I call it us. We are asphyxiating in the fog of our own pedestrian routines which we refuse to carry out as, well, pedestrians.
The soccer moms live out their lives in their massive SUVs, rocking Colbie Caillat tunes and sipping on frappuccinos while they drive Molly to pianoviolintapballetgymnastics and Johnny to soccerfootballbasketballbaseballBoyScouts. The kids never walk to school anymore, because the pervert registry indicates we’re all surrounded. No one shops at the corner store because Costco is only five miles away and has everything – except, of course, for the things it doesn’t. Those we buy at one of a slew of big-box stores at the shopping plaza on the other side of town. The men commute back and forth between their suburban subdivisions and their downtown offices in the latest model of the latest trend in sports cars or oversize trucks because they’ve earned it, damnit.
We drive to the park when we want to take a walk. We stare nonplussed at our double-chins in the rearview mirror as our engines idle at the drive-thru window. We trek in our Jeeps to organic supermarkets because it’s cool to be natural. And all the while, we choke on the ashen excrement of our excess.
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