Rants in the Pants, Episode 15- Downsizing
Some of you may have wondered how I come up with topics for these rants. It has been suggested that I put a lot of time into contemplating my belly button or that I am just a front man for an organization of curmudgeons with a lot of gripes. Well, this information is incorrect. Winter has me in front of the stove with my dogs thinking up rants. In summer, I spend evenings sitting outside in the backyard watching the ducks and chickens while petting my dogs and drinking a nice cold beer. It was in this last mode that I started to question why dogs have taste buds. In my experience, dogs tend to suck down their food like a vacuum cleaner. It barely touches their taste buds. You would think that Mother Nature in her infinite wisdom and her penchant for getting rid of body parts that are no longer needed would have phased taste buds in dogs out by now. I mean, people didn’t need tails when they came out of the trees, so we lost them years ago. Unfortunately, I could not go any further than this thought because Google had no information on it and Mother Nature was calling me to tell me I had eaten too many cherries earlier.
It was in this mode of sitting on the throne that I came up with the topic for today, a topic that I feel will resonate with my readers more than how come dogs still have taste buds: downsizing. Downsizing used to refer to people getting rid of stuff they no longer had a need for. Now it has come home to us in a multitude of ways, and they all mean less.
I noticed downsizing had come to the bathroom in an odious manner. The toilet paper I held in my hand was demonstrably smaller than it had been just a year or two ago. In fact, if we could get hold of a roll from the sixties and compared that with today’s toilet paper, we would find that one sheet from the sixties would cover most of your hand while the one from 2023 would take at least two sheets and possibly three. In addition, the older paper was thicker. You couldn’t see through it. You didn’t have to worry about leakage when you wiped. And don’t get me started on the stuff you have to use in a public restroom and the way it assaults your posterior.
The price of toilet paper in the sixties was about 10 cents a roll. Today, a roll for less than $1 would be highly suspicious, kinda like Hunter’s artwork. This thought led me to think of Nancy Pelosi so I skated to the freezer where I pulled out a half gallon of ice cream only to discover that it was one and a half quarts and not a half gallon, a little shy of a full load, just like Nancy. The price, after downsizing, is also higher, about $1 higher than it was when we got a full half gallon. One does not have to go far to see that downsizing is everywhere from soaps and bleach to paper towels and packages of cookies. The prices are also exponentially higher on everything.
I know. Inflation. It’s all inflation. My momma didn’t raise a fool. We’re being hornswoggled. The companies that produce what we consume are sharing the pain with record breaking profits. Inflation is partly blamed on higher wages, but I’ve been around awhile, and I don’t see wages rising high enough to cause these price increases. Scarcity is also given as an excuse. I don’t see any scarcity except that scarcity engineered by various means used by those who control large companies whose factories are burning down, cutting back on production and going for the quick profits over long term profits and customer satisfaction.
This is what came to me while sitting on the throne experiencing the terrors of TP leakage. I wonder how many other world changing ideas came from…OOOPS. Nature calling again. Gotta stop eating those cherries.