Simply Charming
I find the grocery store to be harrowing. Yes, yes, the glut of choices and branding and mad consumerism has been discussed ad nauseum but my GOD how many toilet papers there are. The single rolls, wrapped in cricklepaper, bodega staple, mass up like Helm's Deep slashed purple and teal; you have double-roll, double-ply, double-roll-double-ply (getting EXPONENTIAL here), quilted quadruple quilted (do you remember those old commercials where tiny cartoon grandmothers actually hand-stitched each square with tinier needles, arthritic fingers plied towards the comfort of your double-cheek? Agh.)
American modernity reverses the adage: invention is the mother of necessity. I want I want I need. (When I was in a fourth grade play, I performed Shel Silverstein's 'I must have that pony' poem to such pitch-perfect acquisitive brattiness that other parents shot mine sympathetic glances for months.)
The attendant anxiety is a documented phenomenon in psychology and marketing: trade-off aversion: standing in the greenlit aisles at eight at night doubled over with the agony of elaborately evaluating angel softness vs. smug environmentalism but a chapped asshole vs. enough toilet paper to reach to the moon and back if only it could withstand the shrapneled satellites and space vacuum (could it? they only ever show that sterile blue water). We flick to half-remembered commercials - those grandmothers, or the awful Charmin' bears. My GOD, who thought THAT was a good idea? laying a sheen of pastel children's book illustration over pure scatology in terrifying double-ply? Shall I be jealous of those bears, in their mint green spring green meadow, who want only one type of TP, unquestioned? It's soothing when expelling the rough(age) buttplug post-hibernation. It makes me ill, standing in that aisle. Bugbear, indeed.
The normal intellectuo-aesthetic criteria - the ones we are good at implementing - don't apply. Like John Barth? It introduces no necessity for arch, postmodern toilet paper. "Is this sufficient for wiping your ass? What does it reflect?*
*When I was a boy I took a shit beneath the boardwalk in Ocean City, mirrored the teeming crowd, girls vomiting on the Cyclotron." The nihilists? "Peristalsis begins and ends with death; each contraction of the bowel eases one closer to one's own end. Tearing a square, withering a tree." Paradox? "You do not want this toilet tissue." Does. Not. Compute.
When my brother was little, he would run down the shelves, behind the toilet paper, knocking a few violently into the aisles, the visual six-gun salute of branding transformed into a literal volley. I'd welcome such a poltergeist at this point - here, I'll buy the ones that kneecapped me.
Toss one in, the one on sale, certain it doesn't matter but still anxious. We must buy toothpaste next. Is this whitening mouthwash wonderful? Is it significant? Is it what we need?
American modernity reverses the adage: invention is the mother of necessity. I want I want I need. (When I was in a fourth grade play, I performed Shel Silverstein's 'I must have that pony' poem to such pitch-perfect acquisitive brattiness that other parents shot mine sympathetic glances for months.)
The attendant anxiety is a documented phenomenon in psychology and marketing: trade-off aversion: standing in the greenlit aisles at eight at night doubled over with the agony of elaborately evaluating angel softness vs. smug environmentalism but a chapped asshole vs. enough toilet paper to reach to the moon and back if only it could withstand the shrapneled satellites and space vacuum (could it? they only ever show that sterile blue water). We flick to half-remembered commercials - those grandmothers, or the awful Charmin' bears. My GOD, who thought THAT was a good idea? laying a sheen of pastel children's book illustration over pure scatology in terrifying double-ply? Shall I be jealous of those bears, in their mint green spring green meadow, who want only one type of TP, unquestioned? It's soothing when expelling the rough(age) buttplug post-hibernation. It makes me ill, standing in that aisle. Bugbear, indeed.
The normal intellectuo-aesthetic criteria - the ones we are good at implementing - don't apply. Like John Barth? It introduces no necessity for arch, postmodern toilet paper. "Is this sufficient for wiping your ass? What does it reflect?*
*When I was a boy I took a shit beneath the boardwalk in Ocean City, mirrored the teeming crowd, girls vomiting on the Cyclotron." The nihilists? "Peristalsis begins and ends with death; each contraction of the bowel eases one closer to one's own end. Tearing a square, withering a tree." Paradox? "You do not want this toilet tissue." Does. Not. Compute.
When my brother was little, he would run down the shelves, behind the toilet paper, knocking a few violently into the aisles, the visual six-gun salute of branding transformed into a literal volley. I'd welcome such a poltergeist at this point - here, I'll buy the ones that kneecapped me.
Toss one in, the one on sale, certain it doesn't matter but still anxious. We must buy toothpaste next. Is this whitening mouthwash wonderful? Is it significant? Is it what we need?