as for the nails

noun as verb: how to save the world in two easy steps
1.  stop unnecessary consumption

2.  love your neighbour 

Our children and our grandchildren do not have a healthy world to move into. They do not. Present tense. We have ruined it. And we continue to make it worse. And we teach them how to contribute to its ruin.

But we could save the world. And get this - it wouldn't even be difficult.

But we won't.

noun as verb: retail is damned hard work on the soul
i want to end with either a story of redemption or a story that strikes the last nail and shows us our ultimate error but today i have neither.  the truth is that every morning that i drive in to work i drive past frosted trees or fields of snow or the breath of cows and horses forming small clouds in the air. sometimes there are ravens or crows. once i saw a moose standing as still as a tree, his face long as a trunk, brown, knotted, immobile.  this is redemption.
as for the nails, they continue to be hammered out one story after another, one day after another, in one store after another, and often well-intentioned.  bang bang bang, we build our shallow graves.


-- Erin