journal features

organic crunchy peanut butter

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kawasaki, 2020.04.28

I've been changing my mind about my local grocery store. When I discovered that there was a drug counter hidden away in the middle (immediately adjacent to a part of the store I'd visited a dozen times prior) I began to realize that there was more to it than I'd first realized. Then today knowing I had four loaves of bread to get through and not even any margarine, I decided to check out the jams. And lo and behold, there was organic crunchy peanut butter. Now, it cost so much for its tiny size I assume it was hand-made by a team of lawyers or was retrieved from the tomb of a pharaoh. Or am I thinking of honey.

And I bought it with my new prepaid credit card, which went without a hitch.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)