Blog, lesson 1

So this is what it comes down to? How cliché. How absolutely and utterly uninteresting. How bland. There is even a giant fake window down here in the basement of this fortress (because there are no real windows in the basement). I spent the last few hours thinking about how you can compare a sheet of uncut baseball cards to a potato. I guess the comparison between potato chips and baseball cards that have been cut are not as astounding. I had to get glasses. I’m farsighted now, but only slightly. Thanks Apple™. “Think differently” how I could still have good vision.

The woman at the glasses store did all these tests where yellowish photographs of hot-air balloons (which had to have been taken in the 70s) were shown to me in and out of focus, far away and close up. The instrumentation - the machinery that was placed in front of my face nearly brought on a panic attack. She was so brutal with me. It was all a routine to her, and she got me out of there as fast as she could. It didn’t matter to her that this was the deflowering of my eyes by optomological penetration. I left her a small sweat-print in the shape of my ass on her black vinyl chair. Now whenever I want to read or do something on the computer I have to put on this tool that enables my body to continue to accept the punishment of corporate technology.

I just got back from Dallas, Texas. The company I work for was there managing this huge conference about fiscal something or others and bottom lines and “head count maintenance” (firing people). I’m not at liberty to say the name of this specific cola company, which is the alternative to Coca-Cola, but they had about three hundred execs from all over the place meeting there to improve sales, and increase profit. Imagine that? Basically the rooms were full of middle-aged white men. There were a few women, and even fewer black people, who had to have felt tokenized when the speakers kept insisting on increasing diversity to help appeal to a more “urban” and “ethnic” market. The speakers all compared everything to sports games, which made the sheer cutthroat competitiveness just raw. There were no fair players there. I think I gagged at one point. They screened this video that insisted their company “owns the culture of youth” and that it’s only those pesky dead people who refuse their product. If only we could make dead people purchase things. Here’s an idea. Rather than wealth going to family when a loved one dies, their purchasing patterns can be tracked and the money can be divided up amongst their favorite corporations. This could be called post-mortem assets.

The theme of the whole conference was TAKE IT ON, and I kept singing it to the tune of “Take on Me”, and “Take it Off” (the Donnas, yuck). It just frightens me how people can be so immersed in an ideology that’s as narrow as a sewer tunnel. Sell soda at any cost. The world will not function without our soda; people cannot have fun without our soda. These are the things they want us to believe! I mean this was a friggin’ soda convention and they didn’t even have recycling cans out. I wanted to sit down with one of the execs and say, “Listen. If you want to increase sales and appeal to a broader youth market, you going to have to make it look like you care about something other than money. Make cola that’s organic, and whose ingredients weren’t gathered by four-year-old rainforest plantation workers. Or you could just close up shop, move to your house in the Keys and shrivel up like a sun-dried tomato and die.” I’d opt for the second scenario.

On a brighter note, autumn is coming quickly. It’s my favorite season. The cool weather, the leaves turning fiery pigments, the harvest, apple picking, pumpkins, and the sweet earthy smell of everything dying. It just makes me want to drink cinnamon tea and spoon with someone warm.