You know when you’re at home, or at a friends house, or at a bar in the middle of the afternoon, or anywhere with a TV really, and you lose focus during the onslaught of commercials? Don’t be ashamed, there are worse flaws to have. Don’t feel too bad, don’t beat yourself up at the bar tonight. It’s hard to keep your energy and attention in step with that of the TV. Especially when you are at the bar. Or at a friends house, or even at home. This is a world filled with flashes of information, and sometimes, information.
But you must know commercials right? Those stories told in thirty second sound bites promoting a product, a service or an event. The bottom line is the persons responsible for those advertisements are strongly suggesting that you move currency from your pocket into theirs, in exchange for the product, service or attendance at event. It’s our shared culture. Liberals call it the zeitgeist of capitalism, if you’re following with the lexicon of contemporary ideologies, which I am not.
So you must know them, know them all, like a close friend, or a wanton dream coming back to remind you, you know them all, this is for sure, whether or not you actually know that you know, unless you’re retarded. But this may be a chicken or egg scenario. Are you retarded from not watching television, or do you not watch television because you’re retarded? You may also be sheltered or pretentious, which is a mild variant of retarded. If you are retarded, then you probably don’t know commercials, or at least the one I am talking about.
Well let’s say you don’t have a television, and live in squalor by choice and are of normal mental competence. Some extremists would call that admirable – not having a television and living in squalor that is- and would have some sort of aborted concept of respect for you. You may be even immortalized by a mural in the future. I never thought groups had any solutions though. But that’s another matter. Even if you don’t have a television, you have at least junk mail, so unavoidably, you know this story, because even if you live in squalor now, you were likely once a frightened young person trapped in spiraling vortex of suburbia, and you remember the junk mail lying callously on your tiled kitchen counter, while your mother carefully peeled the crust off of your bread. You’ve seen the check for millions of dollars with your name on it, and once thought you were the luckiest person on the face of the earth until your parents explained.
Now place yourself in my position. It’s late afternoon, about three and you’re spitting your dip into an empty beer can, when the commercials come on. You get up to take a piss and the door is half open when you hear on the blaring television a van pulling up in someones driveway, and hear the footsteps of Ed McMahon trotting up to the front door of a house tottering on the fringes of some mid Western city, and then you hear a knock and a ring at your door, that is definitely not on the television. Your girlfriend gets up to answer it, when there is a knock and a ring indentical to yours on the door on the television, that announces itself with a dry thud from the lowly speakers on the television.
In a moment everything adds up, and your girlfriend looks up at you from down the hall, with eyes the size of clenched fists that pinch themselves to make sure it isn’t a dream, or myopic mistake, and then Ed comes into the house, your own house, with his bold suit emblazoned with age, and his white teeth dulling the wrinkles in his skin. He is quickly followed by the camera crew, a pack of rabid dogs trained in lighting and capturing this kind of moment.
They force the novelty oversized check through the door jamb, and one of the corners bend, it is a flimsy gigantic check. This monstrosity has taken over your living room, propped up against the exposed wall, and now every object and every person is viewed as being something relative to the novelty oversized check, withs it’s trail of zeroes running off the edge. This giant check has changed your life, and now Ed and the crew and your girlfriend and the millions of strangers watching on their televisions have their sights locked in on you, and your essence is shaking, and everyone is expecting you to say something, and this sickening anxiety that comes with a gift scrapes and clamors like a pestle. Everyone is waiting for you, and you don’t have a thing to say. But they continue to stare, so you must say something to end the pestering, so you mumble through a tightened jaw, “I can’t believe it,” and everyone flinches and exhales in a seething disappointment. Thousands have changed the channel as you stare intently at the enormous check.
Your girlfriend leaps into your arms and wraps her arms around your torso like well fed boas that have been deprived recently, and her nails sink in deep into your skin, exclaming wordlessly “I’m never letting you go, not now.” And then you realized what you always knew, whether you know it or not, that it was a mistake, it was always a mistake, but at least it’s the pleasant kind of mistake, that kind that bloats your wallet and eradicates limits or potentials. Ed looks into the camera and delivers the signature line like a death sentence.
“You just won ten million dollars.”
Everything went down hill from there.
