18 Luxuries

With the first winter storm in Southern California each year the past 10 years or so, residents with Facebook accounts and a good vantage point snap a photo of the snow on the mountains and post it on social media, and it made me think what a mind-blowing futuristic vision that must have seemed in 1979.

Their politics don’t matter if they can take a good snowy mountain photo.

Made me think about trying to explain America’s politics to someone from 1979 in the light of economic beliefs that are blind to privilege and how that blindness bleeds into socio-political attitudes, a dynamic I experience solely through the lens of cable news. And people today have to be reminded that it is science that has brought us this far.

There are 18 holes in a round of golf.  In honor of Golf, here is a list of 18 luxuries I have in my life, thanks to science. (Feel free, Dear Reader, to add yours in the comments.)

Luxury #1 – I have a lot of headphones in my house, from RCA-jack to Dual 3.5mm to USB to Bluetooth to whatever Apple is calling theirs. I believe this is attributable to a collection of coping strategies I learned during key phases of my relationship with headphones such as:

• The broke-recording-sessions-with-not-enough-headphones phase
• The talking-on-the-cellphone-while-driving phase
• The cancel-out-the-airplane-noise-during-international-flights phase
• The keep-conservational-noise-down-in-the-house-during-the-COVID-Bunkering phase.

Luxury #2 – I don’t have to carry buckets of piss and shit through the house to dump it outside. (sorry, that’s 1679.)

Luxury #3 – I have a transportation and distribution infrastructure available to me that allows me to order and pay for groceries and other products – pay for them without touching money! – and have them delivered to my door that has a camera on the doorbell so I can see on my mobile communicator who is ringing the bell, from, like, 12,000 miles away.

Luxury #4 – I have men that come by once a week and haul away my trash in big, loud trucks that disrupt Teams calls if I forget to close the window.  Because a long time ago a bunch of people just like us, or maybe not just like us but much, much better than us, or much smarter, or more foresightful, pooled their money and created an industry that would haul away all of their trash and dispose of it.  Now we argue about whether the company that’s hauling away our trash is doing a “good job” and we argue about what constitutes a “good job,” but we don’t argue about whether we need to keep practicing waste management as a group activity because it’s far more efficient that way when we have this many people.

Luxury #5 – I have table service for 12 while I usually eat from a Trader Joe’s frozen entrée container or a paper plate. I lean to the Spinach Lasagna because it has what to me, who never took a nutrition class, seems like a good balance between calories and % of RDA listed on the ingredients and nutrition label that we all decided via our elected representatives to have on all of our food along with, for perishable food, dates after which maybe you shouldn’t eat this or you might get sick.  The food used to have a USDA Stamp of Approval (maybe it still does) to assure you that the government department that we all pooled our money to establish, to verify that the people producing our food weren’t putting stuff in it that could hurt people and make them sick, was doing its job.

Luxury #6 – I have small electric fans in every room that I use regularly, not to cool the room necessarily, but just to stir up the air a bit when it gets heavy and stale.  Every room. And not one of the fans requires a battery or plugs directly into a wall.

Luxury #7 – I have a space to live where I feel safe, and I have a partner with whom I feel safe. (Now to get them both into the same space.) I have only one space in my safe space where an extension cord is required for daily functional use, and there is room to hide it from regular view but still see enough of it to remind me to inspect it for rodent gnawing every 6 months. I also have, and have had, a succession of cats who keep the rodent population down to acceptable levels (0). (There is another space in the garage where I employ a permanent extension cord, but that is in the garage, which I no longer consider a safe space.  Besides, who puts an electrical outlet around the corner from the door as you enter the garage, past the water heater and behind the file cabinet? Where did they think you’re going to hang your accessories that need charging? Coulda’ moved it after all these years, I suppose.)

Luxury #8 – I have people working in the organization that keeps all of it running according to the wishes of, we hope, the majority of voters, who are good at what they do, so I don’t have to pay attention to that part. Like delivering electricity and heat (or heating fuels) and clean water and communication links and waste management (and waste water management) and roads. Or setting up and conducting elections, and counting votes.  It’s all pretty good, not as perfect as it could be, but good enough given the limited resources we make available to them.

Luxury #9 – I can talk via video-conference with someone on the other side of the planet. For free! And it’s good quality video and audio. So now I don’t have to “commute” on a crowded bus to a large building in the center of town where a bunch of us can work together and eat together and pee and poop into the same toilet, because now we can work together no matter where we are, as long as we have broadband and our own toilets and we adjust for time zone differences. All human societies are built around daylight cycles, probably due to our agricultural heritage, but we don’t have those restrictions today, do we? And just as we’ve all settled on English as the international language of air traffic control, could we all just agree on Pacific Daylight Time as the international time zone of business?

Luxury #10 – I have three toilets in my house. I can use any of them I want to use, but I almost always use the same one, the farthest from the entry door from the garage, which is where I usually enter. Thus, the door designation. I can use a closer toilet if I need to or want to. I used all three of them last week!

Luxury #11 – I can get just about any song I want to play over whichever home speakers I want to listen on by talking to a computer.  Currently listening to Carl Perkins playing and singing “Blue Suede Shoes” from 60 years ago. I can set my thermostat to a new temperature without being physically next to it.  I mean, from like 12,000 miles away! And I can watch what’s going on around the house, and even inside, in real time, from like 12,000 miles away!

Luxury #12 – Even though our group has made five-nines availability of fresh water a priority, I can still buy filters that take stuff that’s not good for me out of the water, or I can buy bottles of water that the people who produced it assure me has had all the stuff that is not good for me removed. So I don’t have daily worries about contracting a bacterial infection that is transmitted through tainted water. Now I worry about catching a rapidly mutating virus from someone who refuses to believe in science.

Luxury # 13 – I have suits and ties I haven’t worn in five years still hanging in my closet. I still have clean underwear in the drawer when the clothes hamper is full. I have books on the shelf in my house that I have not yet read. I have four guitars that I no longer play.  I have jars of specialty mustard in the refrigerator that have had one day’s party use carved off the top; the top of the mustard in the jar is now brownish-yellow.

Luxury #14 – I have space in the garage to store boxes that hold property that we moved with us two moves ago, in 1984, before our daughter was born.

Luxury #15 – I can buy wet food for the feral cats that have caught Roommate’s heart during COVID.

Luxury #16 – I can respond directly, within reason, to public pronouncements from the President of the United States (POTUS), and millions of other people can see my response.  Almost none of them do.

Luxury #17 – I have a camera in my pocket that doesn’t require film, and I can share the pictures and videos I take with it in little stories instantaneously with someone like 12,000 miles away.

Luxury #18 – I can ask the computer factual questions and get correct answers. Without touching the keyboard! Like, who replaced Lou Gehrig at first (Babe Dahlgren), and what was Ted Williams’ lifetime batting average (.344)?

19th Hole – I don’t have to watch Network TV and its commercials to view quality entertainment.