Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living by Nick Offerman

Author:Nick Offerman [Offerman, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Humor, Essays, Autobiography, Non Fiction, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 052595421X
Google: R7rgpxRZ3NsC
Amazon: 052595421X
Goodreads: 17674991
Publisher: Dutton Adult
Published: 2013-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

Make a Goddamn Gift

This chapter hopes to serve as a gentle reminder to myself and all the rest of us to make our gift-giving opportunities in life count. To my way of thinking, the tradition of giving and receiving gifts has been all but ruined by the general prosperity and largesse that we enjoy in America and much of the world today, in effect devaluing the very value and meaning of gifts themselves. The circumstance that makes us so soft as a society is to be found in our complete achievement of personal comfort. The vast majority of our nation’s people can buy pretty much anything they need. Not anything they want, necessarily, but anything they need to achieve a satisfactory degree of creature comfort. Clothing, water, shoes, shelter, food. Beer, throwing stars, charcoal, Doritos, diapers, iPhone apps. The staples.

We’re all complicit here, holding hands, or linking arms, rather, so we can look at Twitter whilst huddled together in our handbasket, barreling straight to hell. To wit: If you had the sand to suggest to me that I lower the window of my vehicle by the method of the downright cardiovascular exercise of pumping a window crank lever around in circles, literally moving the window with my mechanical exertions, I’d pitch a fit that you could hear for a country mile. Holy good Christ, we have made things so goddamn easy for ourselves! Finding our schedules relieved of so many of the tedious household tasks that wore our parents’ fingerprints off, we find ourselves with a surplus of spare time on our fleshy hands. One might proffer the suggestion that we exploit that bonus time to do something like build a canoe, or at least haul one to the creek and paddle it, reveling in the birdsong and whitetail deer that come right down on the creek banks to eat gummy bears straight from our hands. But then, one might easily argue that such an activity would require some energy, some gumption, or, god forfend, some work! Wouldn’t it be easier, one might continue, to remain inside upon our pillowy duffs, lollygagging in regal comfort? It’s a short fall from making that choice to finding oneself online. Shopping. And hey, buying things is fun!

We love to buy presents for our children, our friends, and our neighbors. In America, there really is a lot of time to kill with all kinds of noble pastimes like shopping, and, when you get right down to it, perhaps there is a recipient even more deserving of treats than those aforementioned beneficiaries. I do believe that, as a group, we have determined that we most prefer buying gifts for ourselves. Objects are just so easy to come by. Michael Pollan puts out a new book? Boom, preordered it on Amazon. We can buy ourselves gifts before the ink is even dry on the pages there in the book machine. Once upon a time for me, something commensurate with a Michael Pollan book or a new

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