Watered Down Logic

I like water. It keeps me alive. I like living in Aspen. It’s full of really fantastic people, and a whole lot of schmoozy wallet peacocks, all of whom are harmless in their obviousness, and are easy enough to avoid on any deep level. Hunter Thompson called them greedheads, but I think their heads are small, how else to explain how much bling they need? Generally these people have a mansion, or are building one, “another middle school on Red Mountain,” as I recently heard someone describe what they look like under construction. Or maybe they live in Starwood, which has lately been slightly out of vogue, likely because of the acceleration of a Nazi-like glee for punishing perfectly good drunk drivers, even though they are driving on empty mountain roads at 2:00 am, harmless to most everyone but themselves, or other drunk drivers. Close proximity to town-Aspen has become supremely valuable and uber-cool, and so the distant Starwood has lost the star status it held in the 80's. Nowadays the greedheads want the town. The more in-town you are, the bigger the dollar sign on your forehead.

These people are harmlessly desperate for attention, just like the rest of us, but instead of trying to garner interest by having something interesting to say (or in my case just being slightly crazy), these people just buy 200,000 dollar cars and a leer jet. Generally, much enjoyment can be gleaned from watching them, and allowing them to kiss your ass while they despise you, and mutually demand that we “do something soon.” There is really nothing to this, other than that you both understand that you cannot have too many friends in this town, even ones that totally bewilder you, and you them.

But I really wanted to talk about water, ballet, and the Aspen Music School, officially sponsored by FIJI water. The Aspen Music School is an entity that a member of this community wants to be friendly with. It is better that way. Life is easier. People like you; yet people still get murdered all day in Darfur, where FIJI water is rare as the likelihood of a man landing on the moon in 1823, where the idea of potable tap-water for the general population is a distant dream.

In fact, as someone who grew up in this funny little mountain town, I really have to say that drinking FIJI water in Aspen is as ridiculous as drinking toilet water in Aspen (I have yet to try the latter, but I regret having drank my share of the former). We have the best damn mountain drinking water I’ve ever tasted here. I love our local tap water. I think there is a guy out there who actually bottles and sells it. They probably have a taste for the stuff in the Hamptons, or some other far away place full of rich people where it makes no sense to drink water from if you don’t live there. But from a greedhead perspective it does make sense that we drink FIJI water in Aspen. It is the crème de la crème of water. It comes all the way from Fiji after all, so it must be special. It comes from especially far away, that is for sure. Here we are in Aspen with a Canary Initiative to green our ways, everybody is buying a Prius and are guilting each other with footprint lingo. Water may be the most disgusting sign of the impending doom of consumer culture. We have perfectly good water to drink from our taps, and yet we choose to buy water from the store, and we rarely if ever consider the environmental impact of our purchases or the significance of our habit.

If we want to be special in Aspen, then we should stop doing something as stupid as drinking bottled water, especially since our wonderful tap water tastes so good. Isn’t the price tag on our town big enough to give the water from our taps a golden hue? At the music tent watching Al Gore speak tomorrow, I hope I don’t see anyone drinking FIJI water. If you care about our planet, then why would you drink water which has been packaged in one-time-use bottles, made of petroleum, then transported on giant ships which burn the nastiest fuel in the world, across the sea, and into a port city where it is loaded onto trucks and moved across our roadways burning nasty exhaust all the way? Why would we drink bottled water at all? We should send all the bottled water in this country to parts of Africa and the rest of the world where the people don’t even have tap water, let alone the privilege to drink it. The word on the street is loud and clear: bottled water is not cool.