In the most general sense, I have long been an advocate of people finding real, lasting and meaningful satisfaction in their lives not through the wasteful consumption of lifestyle products and mass media in alienating isolation but rather through their own acts of conscious determination, creative expression and involvement in their local community. I believe that you cannot merely purchase a life that will fit you well; it has to be made by a dedicated craftsman, and that craftsman has to be you.

Though I have put these ideas into practice through public performance of poetry and the accordion, they can of course be accomplished in the private realm as well as the public -- just getting out of bed in the morning can be an expressive act, a bold political declaration. (Conversely, /not/ doing so can be even moreso.) And then there's the choice of what to eat for breakfast. Will you cook it? (Where did you get the recipe?) Did you grow it? (Why not?)

Because this lifestyle is somewhat at odds with the goals society informs us we ought to have (you'll need a higher credit limit to afford the car you'll need to shuttle your children to the gated suburban compound in which you plan to shelter and incubate them until they leave grad school), it can be a somewhat lonely and disheartening time of things.

First provisioning at a series of small markets with a loaf of fresh bread, fruit, and perhaps a piece of cheese, a leisurely urban hike across our most local extremes -- the Downtown peninsula would do fine -- would follow, punctuated with breaks to chew in whatever green space can be found, ongoingly exchanging casual observations regarding sights, sounds and smells we encounter in our trek through a cross-section of the city, and which of them have been done well and which not so well. While it's not quite a walk in the park (rather, a walk from park to park), it's relatively inexpensive, undeniably good for you, and far more likely to yield tangential disclosures of important views regarding the way the world works and our places in it... than sitting in a dark room not talking to each other and eating popcorn would.