Just what are we teaching young people, society at large, in and out of school? Just what is it to be an American today, awash in consumer madness? The Last One with the Most Toys Wins bumper sticker, or is it this little chant: You’ll have to peel this i-thing Apple appendage from my cold dead mind, err, hand?
Straight from “MBS-in-hand” churned copy for Coolman & Associates Advertising and Image Management (AIM). Cool AIM.
Agency days bleak indeed. Frantic. Hive of urgency and tension. Get Word to public. Word was product. Word and image. Factory of words images. Word-image-product proposal better be damn good or say “good-bye” to the
account. Ready. AIM. Fire(d).
Didn’t mingle. All those stressed designers and copywriters stiffening in cubicles, dreaming words and patterns.
Hard steely club music, hate chords. Music of the Angry Young. Construction work for Father. Roofing. Music, and his burly brother, Brother. Rough. Shaved heads. End-of-day paint-splatter, roof dreck, tar.
Music, goateed, smoked cigarette, cigarette, cigarette.
Love. Love. Love.
The Bakery Girl and big soft man-child BEING.
Morning The Bakery; sweet muffins, coffee.
Said she “Wouldn’t mind, you know, were he to ask…”
BEING left his bong, showered, combed. Destination bakery.
“Wanna go eat and maybe a movie?” asked BEING.
She said, “Sure.”
Soon in the apartment regularly BEING and The Bakery Girl, companions.
Not stun-drop beautiful, not Magazine. Hip-Heavy, soft, like BEING. Harem girl allure. Love in BEING’s room. The Bakery Girl partial to men and women. BEING her first man in a year.
Cakes don’t change. Plastic wrappers. “Real” cream filling. BEING. His television, milk and pastries. Adolescent twenty-seven. Soda, smoke, snacks. Like ten years gone had never been.
Passive, floating, shuffled by Time. Sixteen. New body shapes new clothing. Tunes. His room. Door locked. Illicit herb burned in a dirty-water bong. Loitering at the Mall, buying, driving, posing. Movies, pizza, boon companions.
“Won’t last forever,” Guidance Counselor warned.
Aptitude test discovered aptitude.
College: “Media studies.”
Twenty-nine is no longer young. Not old, two-thirds life ahead—possibly. But alas, beyond the market age bracket of the eighteen-to-twenty-fours. Let them pass. We are huge, despite unmarketable advanced degrees, dollars blown on our ‘afraid to work with our hands.’
Look at me. There. In the mirror. Cleansed and dapper. Green-and-yellow Topiary Techniques t-shirt; blue jeans; green-and-black sneakers. Ready to go. Ready to go. Ready to go.
BEING already in the kitchen, sipping coffee he’d picked up at the corner bakery. Sticky buns, muffins and The City News.
[Note: More New Statesman non-news in a time of global Big Brother, Climate Calamity, $5.5 Trillion Held by 1,400 People, War is Peace, Lies are Truth, in a piece, titled: "A Discourse on Brocialism ... On Brand, iconoclasm, and a woman's place in the revolution: a dialogue with Richard Seymour on the question of how to reconcile the fact that people need stirring up with the fact that the people doing the stirring so often fall down when
