Under Plastic

Tipping The Scales

Are you ok? How do you know? What do you go by? Where should we look to figure out where we are in the grand scheme of things? Are things grand? What’s the scheme? I think of teenage girls in school dressed like prostitutes and prostitutes dressed like the dead. I think of freedom of choice and how it can be manipulated by those who are greedy to make the uneducated and spiritless even more dull and soulless. We have hegemony and a rank for everything backed by the banking of the dollar and or credit score. Do I obey the machine or use my instinct? The big machine in the White House or The Church? No, the one in my computer program that has underlined the previous sentence and the one four before it with green, telling me there’s something wrong: there’s something to change. That machine is the same as the big ones though in a major way. There is no grammatical error here. There is only a rule made that could apply to a given situation but not to all. An incomplete sentence is only incomplete if it’s incomplete. You can go by context, isolation, quantity, quality, internal and external.

I had a “friend request” on MySpace from a 25-year-old woman photographed with two other blonde women, all strangers, all making the same mirror-practiced face. She wanted to be my “friend.” I clicked on her “profile” and it became clear she either was 16, or had the mentality of a 16 year old; particularly when I saw that the one person she wanted to meet was Brittanny Spears. I’m not making this up. I’m in journalism mode here. The poet in me is taking a nap. And that’s how she spelled it too, Brittanny.

Imagine walking up to a 16 to 25 year old stranger and asking for their pictures name and other information, and also gaining access to all the other people who they have granted the same wish. Even better, imagine making a t-shirt for yourself that contains all the info contained on the front page of your MySpace Account and wearing that out in public. Name, location, interests, school(s), et cetera. If the government required that then we would all rebel. But we are free to do it on our own. We are free to go to the store and buy the things it might to take to help us look a little more like Brit-tanny too. We have all been reduced by the big machine to quantified and categorized characters which will be underlined with green or red if we step out of line.

“Because you’re mine, I walk the line.” Sounds like communism but it’s capitalism. You can’t sell what you can’t label. You can sell something that can’t be labeled, but you have to label it first. But then that takes the thing out that you were selling in the first place, the external label kills the unquantifiable essence. If you wore a t-shirt that said “cool,” it wouldn’t fit everyone or ever change a person who wore it on the inside. “Of course…” you might say, “…relax, it’s only networking!”

For now, I prefer my "KILL BARBIE" t-shirt.