Selling Dreams
03/08/2004 02:29 a.m.
Ever open up a Westworld magazine? "Travel and Active Living from BCAA." I'm flipping through it casually, and it dawns on me.

We are selling dreams, or using nightmares to drive us into waiting jaws. All of them. Everywhere. Seventeens little capris and Maxim's "How to please Your Woman" and Martha Stewart's tips on how to make little chocolate truffles the kids will enjoy and the whole like of it is just one big churning media world trying to sell us a beachfront view from our cubicles in calenders and desktop backgrounds. Isn't it funny how the default windows XP background is a stunning view of rolling green hills and popping blue skies? From a computer. And it never really screams "You should be here" to anyone, ironically. You think it would as we all sit at home and type type type away like I am right now. Selling dreams. Selling dreams. Dreams dreams in every goddamn unpurchased photoalbum with pictures of little blonde kids who will always remain nameless. Their pictures in those frames don't count at all. You chuck them and fill them with your own memoirs of summer holidays and winter ski trips and everything else you'll miss when you're old and grey and weathered and your grandkids are off continuing the cycle in a world that changed faster than most hairlines. Westworld magazine is selling dreams, curtesy of BCAA. Quaint English houses with moss on the roofs, the same moss we pay people to shuck off our own shingles. Put them in a nostalgic setting and theres another cute little memoir you can photograph and show to your kids. Page 21, groups of people in masks doing drama and theatre and other surrealistic things.Page 24, "How would your family survive without you? (BCAA insurance)" and a close up of a beautiful hand holding a beautiful diamond ring with each one labeled "Clothing." Food." Mortgage". Page 44-45, huge green lawns and an old, preserved building. Tourists, blue skies like always, some clouds- and a man on a little green lawnmower keeping it all looking like amillion bucks (ha. ha.). Some unknown cultural treasure immortalized in black and white. Page 47, people with cameras in groups surveying gravestones. GRAVESTONES! Places where peoples remains are burried to rest in peace, and "oh, oh my how clever, how curious." these frozen people in the picture crowd around to read the message engraved for the person. Page 73, the classic. A deserted beach island. A hammock. Sunshine. Sun sun sun sun sun. A cruise. it screams "Get away from the boring! The ordinary!" We offer relaxation as what? A once a year trip into what's real in life? A brief hiadus from the tall slabs of concrete we imprison ourselves in, in homage to the one true god: Economy.

How do we keep our God happy? Slam us into boxes with artificial lighting, the calendars, the desktops, the pens and pencils and paperclips, paperweights, stacks and stacks of computer paper and printers, scanners, cameras, emails, voicemails, hatemails, whatever it takes! Fill us full of the artificial sweeteners and artificial pickmeups and alcohol to lose the inhibitions and be the children of the Earth we're all too afraid to be without intoxication as an excuse. IF YOU CANT LET LOOSE WITH OUT IT YOU'RE ALREADY DEAD. Dig yourself a hole or get out. God. GOD. We keep ourselves in these boxes because we need money. Our lord Economy fills us with all the necessities of life, doesn't he? All for the paltry price of keeping ourselves cooped up like those cows in metal trucks with their prized hides frozen so cost-ineffectively to the sides like bad leftover in the freezer tupperware. And oh, just alleviate our pain, to make us feel like we should be grateful, lets give SOME people big fat holidays and videocams so when they're out late at the office missing their kids grow up and furthuring themselves from their spouses they'll have that one last summer in Tahiti to replay-

over
and over
and over.
I am currently Detached
I am listening to nothing.