Microphone races are coming to town
Here’s a bummer of a deal. I’ve lost my will to make money. Why’s that a bummer? In and of itself it’s not a bummer. Lots of people could care less about making money. But the vast majority of them are under the age of two. Once you hit the two year mark the 5,000 advertisements you see every day finally start to kick in and you want stuff that will make you want to watch more TV which will make you want more stuff. When is the last time you saw a useful advertisement for something you actually needed? Let me take a guess. Never. I think there was probably a time when we could legitimately benefit from an advertisement and back in that far off time ads were informative. But now, as we all know and often forget, the sole purpose of an ad is to create a need €“ no longer to inform us of what the product is capable of as it is to inform us of what losers we are if we don’t buy it now.
A friend of ours lives out in Virginia in a catholic worker house where they care for people and provide hospitality and protest all the things the rest of us are too busy to notice, all the while riding bikes and baking their own bread. Her house puts out a zine/newsletter called ‘joyful dissent’ and different folks in the community write little articles that inform and enlighten (and I’ll admit make me feel a little guilty at times). One of the highlights is a regular column by the Lesbian Ladies. And, like all the lesbians in my life, these ladies are freaking hilarious. Unfortunately I don’t remember any of the funny parts, or the smart wording that made this statement funny, but the other month they had a line in their that read something like, ‘America’s already bought everything.’ See, when I write it it’s not funny but trust me in the context of their article it was hilarious and true. In the misshapen paraphrase above it’s only true.
Here’s one way I know this is true. Bicycles. I just got done organizing my garage because I had to make room for a couple more bikes. I now have seven. My daughter’s have four. My wife has one. That makes for 12 bicycles in our garage. Plus a jogging stroller and a bike trailer. Out of the 12 bikes only one was bought new, and that was 5 years ago when two of our bikes were stolen. Out of the remaining 11 one was bought used (as were the trailer and jogger). The remaining 10 were all free. They all have taken and will take a bit of work, and a few bucks in new parts but honestly if some goof ball like myself can amass 10 free bikes in the course of a year (in fact a year ago I gave a couple bikes away in a futile effort to downsize) how can any of us justify buying more new bikes? And then (and this only works for me because I like to make broad sweeping generalizations and use Bush like logic) why in the heck do we need to buy anything new?
Because we take in close to 8,000 advertisements a day, thats why.
And because it’s hard to find second hand socks and underwear. And even if you could find it your wife wouldn’t let you buy it. At least that’s been my experience. It’s also sometimes hard to find used shoes. Sometimes it means wearing a size 14 instead of a 12. But they were only 3 bucks and I needed leather tops for my welding class. But I digress. Let’s get back to the issue €“ I lost the will to make money. This is a problem for 3 reasons:
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Groceries
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Mortgage
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Health Insurance
If we could get past those I’d be fine. In fact we’d all be fine. And we’d all be riding around on old beautiful bikes. If you have solutions to these problems please get back to me asap. And if I try your solution and it works my wife would like to reward with 10 free bikes and some slightly discolored boxers I bought at Goodwill.