Word Soup (Scratch Pad)

It's something I never put much stake in.

That is, this idea that the quality of your possessions defined your happiness. It's one of those things most regular folk would agree was downright silly, but everyone goes right ahead and suffers from anyway. This belief that a pair of sneakers act like a dark shore's lighthouse in a sea of commercialized pleasuredom.

Like my father before me, I only had two pair of jeans and a single pair of black shoes. One pair of workboots always sat muddy at the door of our Iowan farmhouse. A journal. Some science books. One aging RCA television set. No VCR.

Oh, as a freelance mover I'd been to nice houses, with cherrywood cupboards filled to the brim with dishware acquired over fifty years of living. Dishware in colors salesmen insisted defined your degree of cultural sophistication. Dishware that I knew in thirty years would be divvied up by thankless children, pissed they had to carry heavy and useless fucking relics out to the van.

That's really the rub, as far as I can see it. Those oceans of time spent acquiring all this shit ends with the rusty stink of spite, tears, packing tape and mothballs. Some man you never met going through your underpants. Not much of a road, if you ask me. Then of course, you didn't.

As I said, they started the whole fuss through advertising. At first the message was a gentle nudge from your neighborhood ice-cream parlor that you might enjoy Rosedale Strawberry Ice Cream. Over time, the message grew teeth, became more sophisticated, and started to suggest that whatever product you currently owned - well, it simply wasn't enough.

Once the planners got involved, they realized that the most effective messages were those that suggested that you were not enough. That you could be repaired, admired and accepted if only you bought more product. Ultimately they cultivated, in everyone, a dark pit of inadequacy where a strong beating heart once stood. I'd always kept this kind of talk to myself and my journal, mind you, as there's not much interest in that kind of chatter on the farm. I always thought about it though. And I wrote about it lots.

I mean, that's an acheivement, using generations of repetitive commercial messages to create a new utopian paradigm out of a dead-end road and a whole lotta bullshit. Once that was completed, the message, carefully crafted by the planners, turned on its robotic haunches and aimed it's think-tank radio gaze squarely upon education and the sciences. They were, after all, the breeding grounds of dissent. Of course we didn't know it then.

Our history textbooks had long skipped over unpleasantries like genocides, or the doling out of smallpox infected blankets to eliminate Native Americans. Only crackpots and other fringe-elements had ever really debated those victor historical omissions, so when concepts and lessons were slowly but consistently altered just a hair further, nobody much noticed here in Benton County, Iowa. Concern, as always, remained squarely fixed on homecoming.

When Mr. Haley, our seventh grade teacher, told us he'd been fired because the education system had been privatized, we didn't understand or much care. In a few weeks product logos began appearing wherever there was an open-piece of visual real-estate, and we were allowed to guzzle soda in class. Upper-classman now hid their rum in soda cans, and nobody paid much attention to the ads. Guidance counselors and school nurses were replaced with physicians, capable of doling out medications if psychiatric evaluation warranted. We weren't sure why they all came from Utah.

Mr. Haley's replacement was also from Utah. The new teacher, Mr. Adams, was a sickly stub of a man with a rusty red beard. He looked like he'd be more at home in a folk festival than in a classroom. His eyes always seemed a million miles away, and his lessons were largely delivered in a monotone rumble. He wore a silver bracelet with a red LED that slowly flashed - he said it was a watch.

Our textbooks were turned in and replaced by a single blue hardbound textbook. Raised, unassuming gold letters on the volume's cover announced its title simply as "Grade 7."