consumer culture

All I thought I’d do was reply to this email, and the next thing I knew I just got all into it. I guess I’ve had some angst built up around the issue of shopping at Home Depot - you be the judge. Afterward I figured as long as I typed that much, it might as well be a blog post.

The author of the original email is Pete, a member of the Fantasy Football league I’ve been in for the last six years. The email conversations between the ten of us in the league aren’t just your average profane trash-talk. I doubt, in fact, that one could easily find such creative, unpredictable, even erudite trash-talk anywhere in the world of fantasy sports. Pete, for his part, regularly cracks my shit up with a style of obscenity unlike that of anyone else I can think of. As you’ll see, he doesn’t always limit himself to fantasy football-related subject matter:

SUBJECT: Re: complaint

Seriously, Home Depot and Loew’s suck moose knuckle.

I’m just trying to find a nice simple roll of Teflon pipe thread tape, and neither of those cockmeister companies carry it. Lowe’s even has an online “project center” where several plumbing-related projects call for the use of Teflon tape, but you can’t buy it from them. Fucking assbags.

P.
–
“I just beat the asses of three thousand men. The hell you leave me alone” - Rodney Leonard Stubbs, Great Outdoor Fight Champion, 1973

My reply:

They have it at the Home Depot on Balboa and Roscoe in Van Nuys*… at least they did a couple of weeks ago when I needed to put on my new shower head. It was kind of on one of those little afterthought-like consoles that they put onto the end of the aisle - the end by the aisle halfway back in the store, so it’s not like you can just walk in, go 15 feet over to the end by the cash registers, grab your teflon tape and turn around. Because that would just make our life too goddamned easy.

Of course, then you have to try to guess which fucking line might move fast enough to get your 1 item rung up in less than half an hour. And don’t think it’s the slick new self-checkout registers, either - at least two, if not three of the four always have an “OUT OF ORDER” sign taped to the screen, and the one remaining LCD panel has some clueless geriatric standing in front of it, brow furrowed, index finger held semi-motionless in midair eight inches from the screen, as though it’s some kind of fucking transactional Ouija board whose unseen force will any moment now magically guide their finger to select the right form of payment. This withered stooge still hasn’t figured out how to use the DVD player he got two years ago, and yet he’s rolled his cart straight into the self-checkout line, because darn it if he won’t get a kick out of making that barcode scanner thing do that “BEEP” noise. Dear God, deliver us from Depot. You can forget about the self-checkout-register-monitor kid in the orange apron untangling this situation anytime soon - she might as well get out her Sharpie and and start making her “out of order” sign. I swear, the lines at Costco might be longer but at least they fucking MOVE.

Hope you have a super rest of the day anyway, Pete. Is there a True Value nearby?

Best of luck!
Derek

^* Pete lives in Florida; I live in Los Angeles

Although I’m usually reluctant to indulge in simple linkblogging, I would like to call your attention to a product that is, in more ways than one, exceptional. Via The Map Room and The Earth is Square:

Does your vehicle’s GPS navigation system confuse you more than it helps you? Do you glance at the screen to discover that you appear to be motoring over a golf course? When you pull out of your driveway on a quick run to the grocery store, does a disembodied female voice attempt to guide you to the Company Picnic you attended last August? Then you are among the millions of drivers today that just aren’t cut out for satellite technology.

Introducing the Analog GPS. It’s back to the navigational basics with this new (yet very old), state-of-the- Age of Enlightenment instrument. It’s just like the one great-great- great-great granddad used, with an attractive brass finish and its own wooden carrying case! As the vendor states, “Not included are the required declination charts (call for details) or the extremely accurate watch you are going to need to use this thing. Meets R.N. standard 3329-5 of 1787.”

So act now! You can be a Luddite on wheels for the extremely high price of $3,117 plus shipping - and by “shipping,” we mean six to eight months to the West Coast by way of Cape Horn.

Freshmakerccino?

Back in the day, the sleeve was for your protection. It was a 60% post-consumer fiber barrier between your precious drinking hand and the scalding side effects of an otherwise delicious cup of coffee. After a little while, corporate America inevitably got around to adorning the coffee sleeve with ad copy, or at least some brand marketing. Phew! My God, people - we can’t just have blank cardboard sitting there in people’s hands!

Today the coffee sleeve marketing channel took a turn for the absurd. I wouldn’t have known about this had I not needed cash to get out of the Encino Medical Center parking lot (proof positive that the Blog God watches over us all). The parking lot attendant told me that if I bought something with my ATM card in the coffee shop, they would give me change in cash. Thus did I end up with the Mochaccino Freeze pictured here, its gratuitous sleeve adorned with the sample packet of Altoids. So I was left there wondering, just how cold is this drink? Do I need gloves? If so, what kind of protection do you have for the inside of my mouth? Based on the evidence, my breath was the least of my worries.

As pretty much anyone surely would, I detached the mints and threw them away before I even took a sip. Turns out the mochaccino tasted like it had 60% post-consumer fiber ground up inside it (and possibly another packet of Altoids, wrapper and all). At least it got my car out of the parking lot.

When I first got my Treo, I didn’t foresee much use for the camera feature.

The problem with hair removal?
It should be more nutritious.

Turns out I was wrong. I seem to keep encountering things that simply must be captured on film, if only for the purpose of verification that I didn’t make them up. Something like the sign pictured here, that just can’t be fully conveyed as a verbal anecdote.

The establishment that had this sign adorning its window is called “Beauty Center” - a profoundly uninspiring store name if ever I heard one. In fact, it’s such a boring name for a business that I can’t help but wonder if they were thinking of re-naming it, and the sign was a test run of sorts for one of the new name finalists. In fact, I hope it was, purely for the sake of the owners. Who the hell is going to remember a beauty supply store called “Beauty Center?” “Fresh Tomatoes and Leg Waxing,” on the other hand, is pretty much unforgettable.

Unintentional comedy has never tasted
so refreshing

The whole “energy drink” fad is silly to begin with, but at least Red Bull and Monster Energy don’t make me giggle out loud. To me, the only way that the idea of an energy drink called RockStar could be any funnier would be to also have - you got it - DIET RockStar. And yet, the marketing geniuses at whatever company produces this stuff didn’t hesitate to go there. That, I believe, was when they changed from marketing geniuses into comic geniuses.

I also simply adore the way they package the stuff as if it were malt liquor. I wonder if the people who drink it do so with a brown paper bag wrapped around it. Who does drink this stuff? And moreover, do any of them actually feel more like a rock star when they do?

Let’s spin this idea out a little:

A huge rock star - someone like, say, David Lee Roth in his Van Halen heydey - arrives at the door of his record producer’s penthouse suite, flush from the band’s triumphant, ass-kicking performance at a sports arena a few hours earlier. He rolls in his usual style: boots, leather pants, aviator shades, his bare torso and arms covered only by a white sable coat and three or four scantily clad groupies, not necessarily in that order. A record label lackey answers the door and greets him enthusiastically.

“Heeey, what’s UP, man? Dude, rock and ROLL, you were fucking AWESOME tonight! Fucking incredible fucking show, man, I mean… amazing. Uh-mazing. You are a fucking LEGEND!”

The rock star’s slack jaw barely moves. “Thanks.”

“So come in, come in, man! Make yourself comfortable, mi casa su fucking casa, you know? You want something to drink? GET THE MAN A FUCKIN’ DRINK! What’re you you drinking, dude?”

The rock star says, “I’ll have a RockStar.”

“Excusemewhat?”

“I’ll have a RockStar. No wait, WAIT…” the rock star pauses intensely, then declares, “a DIET RockStar.”

…Seewhattamean, blogreaders? You could almost hear the record scratch sound after that last line, couldn’t you?