You know that you are getting old when you start to complain about the price of things. For a start, we shouldn't be complaining at all, being spoiled brat children of the capitalist consumer first world, but hey, sometimes you just have to speak your mind, even if the complaints are not entirely justified.
Yes, you guessed it kids, it's time for another rant. This time, I am aiming my vocabulary gun at the rising tide of ripoffs that surround us every day. What with the vast tsunami of cheap low-quality imports from China downgrading our quality values, the flow-on effect seems to be far-reaching indeed.
The straw that broke the camel's back and led to this rant was the ticket prices for Tori Amos. Hey, I like her music - I saw her show back in the Little Earthquakes early days, and it rates as one of my favourite concerts ever. However, her new tour has ticket prices at a hefty $120 a pop. Erm, did I miss something, or is she really something more than just a girl with a piano? It can't be that expensive to transport and re-tune that thing (the piano, not the girl).
The only person I would ever pay $120 to see would be Jesus doing his Magic Tricks Revival Tour. And yet, this ticket price seems to be the norm for big acts. Even local acts with pretensions of grandeur seem to command ticket prices of $60 plus. Ridiculous in my opinion.
Obviously the vast majority of people in Australia seem to have way too much disposable income. I can't see any other reason for such stupidly expensive prices being charged. I personally blame the electricians and plumbers of Australia for earning way too much money, and driving up the prices of beer at our local drinking holes. $4.20 for a schooner of beer. Do me a bloody favour!
Maybe it was the olympics that did it. Sydney always used to have a bit of a superiority complex. The olympics only seems to have made it worse. The olympics, contrary to popular belief, does not bring any good whatsoever. They spark a vast spending spree on venues that no-one will ever use again, create a brief euphoric couple of weeks where doped-up super-athletes roam the streets and bang anything that moves, and then Starbucks moves in afterwards with their oh-so-ethically-incorrect beverage joints. The hotels and bars that hiked their prices up during this time of blissful ignorance suddenly realise that they can get away with inflated prices all of the time, and the general populace pays for it from that time onwards. Delightful, and true capitalism at its finest.
A classic example of rank over charging happened to my good lady wife and I recently. Due to a mixup with non-existent leftovers, we decided to give the newly refurbished Berowra Hotel a crack for their bistro meals. Gone are the days of $12 or $15 meals or, dare I even suggest, the halcyon days of $8-10 counter meals. The average meal was $20+, but in the spirit of adventure, and since we eat out only about 10 times a year, we decided what the hey, and bit the bullet.
Celia ordered the atlantic salmon fillet, and I ordered chicken green curry. Despite me ending up with a red curry instead of what I actually ordered, I swallowed my desire to bring this to their attention. It was very fortunate that I swallowed this, as it made up for the paltry size of the meal. It was one of those nouveau cuisine serving sizes - more a scale model of a meal than an actual meal in itself. My red curry was a bit of red slop in the bottom of the massive bowl, with a finely sculpted minaret of rice, and three bok choi leaves balanced precariously on top. Celia's atlantic salmon was wafer thin, and if it weighed in at 100 grams, I would have been very surprised.
Don't get me wrong - these tiny morsels were actually quite delicious, and if they came in anything but a child's entree size, I would be back there like a shot, ready to eat to my heart's content. But to pay that amount of money for something that you eat and then say "Right, I'm ready to eat now" is a bit of a joke.
And so, I continue to remain on the border of the capitalist consumer world, dipping into it only when I have to (and doing so begrudgingly), contributing as little as possible to a system that I despise. It's funny really, that I take such great inspiration from a Jewel song - "Life Uncommon". I have applied it to everything that I hate in the modern world. People who know me passably well may consider me to be a bit of a miser with my money, but this is not the case at all. I do it not because there is some kind of Scottish blood coursing through my veins. I do it because I despise the consumer culture and economic growth above all reason (you know, all that shit that John Howard continuously espouses).
I do it because I hate that the people of the world are killed and kept deliberately in poverty to feed our insatiable appetites. Instead of falling into the mass-media-fed world where happiness can be bought as long as you have the right credit cards and shop at the right places, I follow my Jewel mantra to the letter and apply it to capitalism:
Set down your chains
And lend your voices only to sounds of freedom
No longer lend your strength to that
Which you wish to be free from
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