Sunday, January 16, 2005

COOL MINT GEL IS PEOPLE!

There is a blurb on AOL today entitled "How to Hide your Television; Don't Let your TV and Electronics Ruin your Decor". Explain to me how this works when just weeks ago everywhere I looked I saw ads about form and function in the new electronics. Beautiful components and TV's to be hung like art from our walls.
They are fucking with us.
They have been fucking with us for a long time and they will fuck with us as long as we want it.

That said, I thought I'd tell you about inspiration at the grocery store. We pretty much covered the Puppet Physics overview and nobody raised a hand so I'm going to assume you GOT THAT.

I'm posting a photo of one of my rubber rats. This one lives in the garden. I have a new computer, having lost my previous computer to sudden onset of old age and cheapness. The new computer is devoid of image files as of yet so I walked out tonight in my pjs and bare feet to snap this photo. It's what it is.

So---Inspirations and Ideas. Mostly I run from them. I run from the never ending flood of random, overlapping ideas.
The noise, the noise, the noise.
I look for quiet, where I might focus on ONE idea.

I can do this at the grocery store, late. There is one not too far away from my house that stays open until midnight but dims its lights at 10 pm and is nearly empty from then on.

So I go late, when we need milk, or bananas, or a Slim Jim. They know me there, and they are nice. I tend to talk to myself when I am thinking (in the way I think in the grocery store at night). They may have noticed. It probably wouldn't be so bad if I didn't gesture.... Oh well, it's a good thing. I can walk around the store for a half hour or so, in a floor-length black coat (or army green if it's raining) and nobody bothers me. I'm crazy---I'm not stealing.

One thing I realized tonight is that I'm sick of GEL. Really, really. I can appreciate gel technology. It's a good thing, excellent in the right application. But I miss shampoo and soap and lotions and paints that didn't have the consistancy of snot. Enough, really.

So it's a little surreal in the grocery at night. But I see something new or unexpectedly weird every time. This only works if I don't shop. I mean, I have to buy something---buying something is why they let me walk around talking to myself. But I don't think about shopping. I look. There are layers in a grocery. Lots of different kinds of people shop for food. Everybody eats.
There is language in the aisles--- on the packaging, in the logistics, in the lighting . Walk down the aisle and look at the boxes and the bottles and the cans. Feel it. You're a mark.
They are fucking with us.

Try it. Then read some Vance Packard, say The Hidden Persuaders. The Hidden Persuaders When was this written? Yeah, before lots of us were born---heh, including me. Baaaaaaahh
Now try it again. Read the book and take another look around.
See it now?
No need to be afraid---I'm not saying that everything in the boxes and bottles and cans is bad for us---though lots of it is. I'm suggesting instead that you buy the product and not the pitch.

Ahhh--the grocery at night...
Still, all that aside, going somewhere ordinary at a weird time is similar to changing lenses, or switching the sountrack of a familiar movie or looking through water. It's good for the brain...

I'll be back in a bit. Take care.

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