Today, after seeing the doctor about my persistent cough, I want to the drug store, to pick up the inhalers that I’d been prescribed. And, while there, waiting, I strolled around, looking at stuff, and coughing on things. I found two things to be particularly interesting. In front of Better Homes and Garden magazine, I saw a copy a new publication entitled Fifty Shades of American Women Who Love the Book and Live the Life. While I admit my knowledge of the best selling Fifty Shades of Grey series is somewhat limited, I know that the central character is a young virgin who gives herself over to an older, wealthy sadist who, among other things, brings her to orgasm by “assaulting” her with a riding crop. While I don’t have any problem with what adults want to do in the privacy of their own homes, even if it does sound like something out of one of Ayn Rand’s masturbatory fantasies, I find it funny that anyone would walk into Walgreens and happily self-identify as someone who “lives the life” of a sex slave. And I found it even funnier that, according to the blurb on the cover, this issue contains “Christian inspired cocktail” recipes! (That tells me quite a bit about the demographic reading this series.) So, I took a picture, and posted it to Instagram. And, then, a few minutes later, I found something else that I found funny, and took another picture, which I likewise posted to Instagram. This time it was an $8 piece of plastic advertised as a Premium Pill Crusher. As a marketing person, I liked that they used the word “premium,” in order to differentiate from all the other pice-of-shit pill crushers out there, like the terribly confusing bottom of the water glass that my grandmother used to use. So, I posted these two images, got my inhalers, and went about the business of sucking down poison in parking lot, in hopes that it might finally bring the coughing fits to an end… And that’s when I heard my phone beep, indicating that someone had sent a comment. It was my young friend Josh. His comment? “Looks like someone’s having a party.”
It hadn’t occurred to me how the two images might look when posted alongside one another. So, now, apparently some folks think that I’m crushing up pills in preparation for a wild night if sadistic assaults on young, Christian virgins. Let that be a lesson to all of you on Instagram.
It kind of reminds me of an idea I had a long time ago for a game in which a bunch of people would go to Wal-Mart together and each try to select three items that, when put together in front of a cashier, would be the most troubling… For instance, one might select the complete first season of Toddlers and Tiaras on DVD, a case of lube, and a giant American flag blanket. (Most of the best ideas, I find, incorporate lube and/or rat traps.) I called it, Walmarting. Unfortunately, I never took any effort to protect the idea, and I’m sure someone else has done it by now. There’s probably even a reality television show in production.
