A great quantity or heap.
I questioned excess as a child.
A newspaper advertisement from a car dealership listed several vehicles for sale, with specifications for each. 4-wheel drive was one feature. AM/FM/Cassette was another.
But one feature stuck in my mind as being excessive. That feature was “Ice Cold Air”. At 13 years old I thought to myself “Who needs ‘Ice Cold Air?’ We, as a people, do not need ‘Ice Cold Air’ in our vehicles.”
I imagined myself standing up for this cause, embodying the common-sense antidote to this particular excesses of marketing and American language.
Ice cold air, I would explain to a grade school auditorium occupied by my 3 followers, is too much. Icicles form on the windows, obstructing your view of the road. Your breath is smoky-looking vapor. To simply drive to the grocery store on a hot day you need a winter coat and thermal underwear. And are our vehicles designed for 100-degree weather on the outside and 30-degree temperatures inside?
I would wait for a response from the audience. There would be none. I would thrash in my mental cud, unable to fit it in my mouth for clearer articulation but never backing down from my conviction that car dealers advertising “Ice Cold Air” promote decadence and
As a child I had fantasies of myself as a politician or self-appointed activist hunting for micro-issues, starved for unique problems to solve. Matters of excess seemed particularly easy prey for me, and I find that today I still see conspicuous wealth and concentrated abundance as targets of derision.
The fantasies endure, though — fantasies of educating the public about how tummals of Ice Cold Air in your vehicle will suffocate you with its wastefulness.
Today I imagine summoning the articulata to describe the fringes of waste that litter every human dealing, every social and mental transaction. Everything generates waste. Every thought, every gesture, every deflection of memory.
