Sexorama

Don't know what's for sale, don't care.

Sex sells. Ask anyone. I recently embarked on a six month campaign to make myself as sexy as humanly possible. After I had done everything humanly possible I enlisted the help of science to pursue as many inhuman/nonhuman/subhuman avenues to sexiness as are available to the American consumer. I wish that you could see how sexy I am now. I’m all muscles, abs, dimples, high cheekbones, low-cut jeans, bulges, lumps, humps, swellings, hi-lights, hair plugs, butt plugs, Botox, piercings, tattoos, tummy tucks, butt lifts, face lifts, face peels, low-carb meals, and Viagra. On top of all those improvements, I stick a sock in my pants just to be on the safe side.

Now I am so sexy that I am starting to leak. Does anyone have a tissue? I hope that doesn’t stain my new sexy furniture. Who would have thought that being this sexy was going to be so messy? With almost every step I take I’m squirting something out of somewhere. I’m so fertile these days that I actually knocked-up someone at my bank—over the phone! I don’t even know her name.

The whole concept of "sexy" has been so worn-out by advertisers that by now "sexy" is like some 90 year old transvestite prostitute that the marketers doll up in a fresh coat of make-up and hot pants and put back on the street, night after night. The old whore is forced to sell everything from paper towels to cellular phones, and if she comes home empty-handed she gets slapped around.

In our era, things like palm pilots, mini-vans, cuff links, SUV’s, bow ties, hand bags, shitty light beer, deodorant, and just about everything else that can be bought or sold is touted as being "sexy." When during the transaction, at what point during the consumerist shell game does society lose track of what human sexuality is all about? How long can we subject ourselves to the marketing glory hole before our genitalia become vestigial organs like our appendices or tail bones?

I’m not a 90 year old transvestite hooker—not yet, anyway—but if I wee I’d wear a thong and low-cut jeans so when I sat on a bar stool everyone could look at my hairy, shriveled backside. I mention this because I forgot to mention earlier that, according to the advertising geniuses, ‘sexy’ is the realm of the young. Marketing creeps feel that 18 is the perfect age, but that is only because that is as young as they can get away with selling in lieu of our current judicial system. In the absence of consent laws I’m almost certain that marketers would use a female fetus to sell light beer. You can’t be too young or too thin, as they say (I’m quite sure that the "they” here are advertisers).

I’m not fat, old, and ugly—not yet, but I hope to make it there some day. Something that I have always suspected, and what advertisers don’t want you to know, is that fat, old, and ugly people are capable of achieving orgasm. I’d bet that right now there are old, fat ugly people humping their brains out and they are doing it without paper towels or shitty light beer.

While Visiting the Louvre

They say that when you die the first thing that happens is that you crap yourself. After all the heartache and indignity that we endure throughout our lives, to think that this is the thanks we get at the moment of our demise really pisses me off, if you’ll pardon the poor choice of words. I don’t understand why people get so concerned over issues like infant mortality and crib death. At least babies are wearing diapers when they die, so they’re covered, so to speak, when the inevitable bowel spilling occurs at check-out time.

This is not how I want to go out. Either I go without food and water for a week before I die or I come up with some other plan. When I die I have decided that I want fireworks to come shooting out of my intestinal tract. It doesn’t have to be an entire Fourth of July celebration; maybe something like a boat flare would be more appropriate. Or maybe just a sparkler pops out, or better yet, one of those birthday candles that stays lit even when you try to blow it out. That would be hilarious. Balloons would be a really nice touch, but I can only imagine that what they would be filled with—considering their source—would take the life out of the party if some little kid accidentally popped one. I have no first-hand knowledge as to whether or not these gas-filled balloons present a fire hazard even though I went to scout camp when I was a kid.

Is there any way possible for me to salvage even a shred of respectability from an essay that touches on such disturbing matters as incontinence at the time of death, crib death, and fart balloons? My intentions were good. All I was trying to do was elevate humanity at our lowest point and make it a more joyous occasion. It’s not like I came up with the idea that when you die you shit yourself. If were up to me I’d have a white dove fly out of my blow hole, not a steaming pile of the Indian food I had for dinner, which smells even worse now than when the waiter brought it out last night. So don’t blame me. Take the issue up with your pastor, or rabbi, or imam, or maybe a justice of the peace.

I think that this essay is the low point of my writing career thus far so tomorrow I will write a humorous essay about the classiest thing that anyone could possibly imagine. I’ll write an amusing anecdote about something that happened to me when I was visiting the Louvre in Paris. And it didn’t happen in the bathroom because that would totally defeat the whole purpose of trying to elevate my writing. Nope, my next essay will be pure class.

The Unexamined Consumer: America’s Lost Voice

An unexamined product isn’t worth buying.

To answer why a local NBA star would go through the trouble to get a new type of mobile phone sent to him from one of only five cities that sell it, the Seattle Times replied, “If you have to ask, you probably aren’t cool enough.” The piece goes on to say just how cool the new $400 phone is and how many celebrities are using it. I would rather grade the spelling tests of a group of special education third graders than read the quasi-literate text messages sent by the high-profile morons featured in the article. I guess this means I’m not “cool.” I’m definitely not “cool” enough to wear one of those retarded cell phones that clip to your ear and look like a hearing aid from about 1952.

This same paper had a four column, half page article about the new version of King Kong which never once mentioned the fact that the $200 million movie is almost assuredly a complete piece of shit. I heard Kong’s director talking on NPR about the movie in such reverential tones that you would think that he had written a sequel to The Iliad in ancient Greek. I was waiting for the radio host to stop Mr. Jackson and ask, “But isn’t this movie just a remake about a big, horny monkey?”

The automobile section of every American paper supposedly gives consumers an unbiased view of the product for sale but I have never read a review that questions whether or not this country really needs another over-priced, gas-guzzling leviathan on the streets. The auto section is supposed to provide consumer information but all that I see is advertising.

The New Yorker magazine has a weekly movie review section that almost always reviews the big, shitty Hollywood blockbusters, even though I hardly think that readers of that magazine would bother to see a film like Charlie’s Angels. The magazine will often ignore smaller budget movies that are geared towards intelligent adults. It’s most critical reviews are often of small budget independent films. That’s like picking on the smallest kid in the class who doesn’t have a big brother. Once again you have to ask yourself if this is consumer education or product cheerleading.

A casual glance at the bigger, high-gloss magazines and it becomes pretty obvious that they are about 90% devoted to advertising. It’s not that I have anything against a magazine making money, but if marketing drives its content then it becomes not much more than a shopping flyer.

TV is the worst offender in keeping the public uninformed about consumer choices. Television’s message seems to be, “Buy it and shut the fuck up.” “But…what about…” “We said buy it and shut your pie hole.” OK, we got it.

If newspapers, magazines, radio (even ad-free NPR), and television all seem to be too heavily influenced by marketing to give the public an objective view of contemporary America, where do we go to find the truth? Beats the shit out of me. Modern American fiction seems to be fairly hopeless from what I have read. Most writers don’t seem to know much about anything except writing. I don’t want to read anything by someone who just spent two years in a writer’s workshop. I’d rather read a book by someone who just spent two years in prison in Guatemala or two years working in a Nigerian diamond mine. If you are writing about the life of a writer you have already failed as far as I’m concerned.

America is in desperate need of voices. Product hawkers and naval gazers we got in spades. We need witnesses, not parrots. I have nothing against buying stuff, but it isn’t an end in itself.

What's that Smell?

With that first whiff you hardly notice. You are only aware that something is slightly amiss. You try to go about your business, but there is no mistake; that is no alpine meadow you are smelling. You cautiously inhale through your nose. Oh yes, that is definitely not good. That is mildly offensive, no doubt about it. Now it’s starting to roll in like a morning fog, a very unpleasant haze. The fetid fog is quickly becoming a malodorous miasma. I’ll just spray a bit of this air freshener. OK, this isn’t funny anymore. It’s official now; it stinks in here. The smell has just graduated into a stench. Can someone open a window? PU.

Who died? For the love of all that is holy, can somebody light a match or something? I would burn down an orphanage if it meant that smell would go away. The aroma is so bad that I think that I may be asphyxiating. Think of a wonderful perfume, and now think of the exact opposite, now think of it being ten times worse than the opposite of the world’s finest perfume. Now try to imagine that someone has crammed your nasal passages with the rancid flesh of a rotting musk ox carcass, a rotting musk ox carcass with BO.

What could possibly be the source of this profane stench? Take a guess. The smell is coming from God’s little miracle: the human body. There is no getting around it; we reek something fierce. Left to its own devices, the human body would gag a maggot, it could knock a buzzard off a meat wagon, it can peel paint.

At least this is what American advertisers would have you believe. So much of America's economy is based on the buying and selling of products to combat odors. Marketers have done a great job of making us self-conscious of every single human emanation and discharge. To an advertiser, an armpit is a stinking Chernobyl, the human foot becomes a malodorous Katrina, and the mouth is more disgusting than a port-a-potty at a chili cook-off. Michelangelo took a hunk of marble and fashioned David; advertisers take the human body and make you believe that it is an olfactory holocaust that requires a long list of products to keep it even remotely tolerable.

Lemony fresh, pine scented, maximum strength deodorizer, odor neutralizer, kills germs that cause bad breath, peppermint, and these are all things supposedly contained in a single breath mint the size and shape of a rat turd. Your body is a toxic waste dump. There is more than a need to keep a constant vigil, no, you need to wage an all-out war to combat the forces of odor that live inside of you. It is a life-long battle that begins with a baby’s first diaper change, through the disgusting hormonal teen years, and ending in death. That’s when humans really start to stink up the place. We actually have to be buried or burned when we die because of the horrible smell.

This inexorable process initiated by advertisers has finally taken on the human body’s biggest odor challenge: excrement . Someone has produced a pill that lessens the odor of fecal matter. Now if they can just do something about the taste.

Oral Junk Mail

I was driving across town the other day with a friend and I was in the middle of telling him a story about getting a broken window fixed in my car when I slammed on the brakes. “Oh my God, this story is really boring but I don’t know how to extricate myself from it unless I just stop right this second.” My friend agreed. I cut as quickly as I could to the conclusion of my tedious tale. I wondered out loud whether or not it was even safe for me to drive while telling such a dumb story. People faint from boredom all the time. "What about me? I have to listen to this drivel." My friends are always there for support. Perhaps I am kidding myself but I don’t think that as a general rule I am a boring storyteller.

What I should have done was to stop in the middle of my story to see if my friend was paying enough attention even to notice. I will try that the next time that I think that I am recounting a less-than-thrilling tale. A lot of people that I know suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder so if they aren’t following what I say it may not always be my fault but can be attributed to the fact that they watched too much TV growing up.

I have considered not talking at all. I could just learn sign language but then I thought about how boring a boring story could be in sign language. The only advantage I saw in this is that the sign for “Shut your cake hole” is a lot more polite than the oral version. I could write all of my stories on paper thus giving those around me the option of either skipping over the truly pointless passages or simply discarding my dispatches like so much junk email.

Let’s face it. We are all pretty boring. Not many of us have great stories to tell, at least not very often. Not only are our stories boring, but they don’t have the arresting openings of junk mail. We delete, without reading, junk mail with subject lines like “Coed Naked Teens” and “Earn Millions Refinancing Your Home” so why do you think we want to hear your story that begins, “I was watching this show on the Weather Channel last night…?” I’m quite sure that I have told some stories so boring that my friends wonder why humans ever bothered to develop the capacity for speech.

Since we are being so out in the open and honest, let me just say that you guys are pretty boring most of the time. I would rather listen to a car alarm go off than hear you tell me about the weird dream you had last night. What’s that you say? You already heard my story about how I got locked out of my apartment and had to sleep in the hallway? Delete. Excuse me but I was just trying to fill the conversational vacuum so that you wouldn’t go on for fifteen minutes about your new diet. Delete. Yes, I know that I am still talking about the Tour de France and it was over five months ago. Delete. At least I’m not talking about the mermaid baby you saw on Oprah. Delete. What’s that? Well, I’m not talking to you either.