This entry is the fruit of bitter revenge. This is to say that the little black keys clicking away under my fingers only receive the words of this entry because my ex-wife forbid me to buy them while we were married. Let’s step back.

When I got off the plane in December 2008, I stepped out of the sweltering heat of Ho Chi Minh City into the monochromatic deadness of wintertime Minnesota to face down my demons. I was all set to rendezvous with my ex at a café in the crowded, Christmastime Mall of America for “closure” or God knows exactly what. When you’re an angsty, recent divorcee the word “closure” has some kind of mystical meaning that only a year later do you realize is a puff of fart from a decrepit psyche.

Throughout our 2-year marriage, I’d been fairly desperate to replace my aging, rusting, sputtering, smelly old laptop with something that wouldn’t require as much patience as alternating current, but I was denied time and again by my more fiscally minded spouse. So I did what many divorced men are likely to sympathize with: I bought a fucking MacBook on my way through the Mall.

Well, in the end, I’ve turned out to be the butt of that joke. Clearly, I didn’t have the money for this little jewel of mine (oh, I love you baby), so I slapped down a MasterCard and promptly pretended it never happened, just as I did for my roundtrip ticket to the States, just as I did for 1,300 miles of gas and two hotels. And food. And debt has a way of snowballing your life.

So, in an effort to destroy the beast that is my credit card, I’ve been back working for the last few months. Accumulating things got me into this mess, and now I find myself at home having just purchased some $180 jeans wondering how that consumerist plaque caught up with me.

You have the privilege of perspective when you’re on the road to keep your pecuniary priorities plumb. Sorry, that was way too cute. I often wondered, choking down on crackers and tuna while traveling, how I could have ever spent $15 on a lunch back home or wasted a hundred dollars on some piece of crap I never needed, when every dollar means a day or a week abroad. And now I’m home again accumulating crap.

It’s a disease people. I admire anyone immune to it, because I am sure that the majority of us are full-fledged victims. Myself included.

Don’t take this for an anti-consumer, or worse, an anti-capitalist rant. I love crap, but boy do I hate how it interferes with my priorities.