Herald/Examiner

It's difficult to tell sometimes what actually constitutes "living." The primary social pressure, for Americans at least, is to consume. The idea can be an upsetting one given the shallow, prosaic pragmatism of it: it's a conveyor-belt existence, rattling us past pretty shop windows, erected and fixed by the corporations small and large strip-mining us for lucre and page-views, before we just sort of slump off the end into the discard pile, like looted boxes no one can be bothered to fold up neatly or even properly break down for recycling.

We've just completed our annual orgy of hard-sell, the four-hour medley of pitches and angles stitched together by the odd interruption here and there of some sort of football game. Nothing really epitomized it more than the soul-itching mediocrity of the Pepsi Halftime Show (sometimes also featuring Justin Timberlake). The show, such as it was, was designed specifically not for entertainment, but for safety. Not anyone's physical safety, although that was heavily implied by the limpness of the affair overall. Katy Perry rode in on a robot dinosaur five storeys tall and Lady Gaga literally jumped in off the roof of the stadium* when they had a crack at the same show. Hell, even old-ass Bruce Springsteen hurled himself dick-first into a union camera operator. The much younger JT... sort of went up some steps pretty slowly a couple of times? Needless to say he escaped without a fracture to either hip.

No, the goal was for everyone's emotional safety, and by that I mean ongoing marketplace commercial viability and indemnification from liability. The last time Justin appeared in one of these things, a long list of people had to apologize to viewers and advertisers because we all accidentally(?) saw up to 20% of a human nipple. Would that make you think to buy more Pepsi? Of course not because Pepsi is not a thing people buy when thinking about it. All soda is essentially slow poison for the human pancreas. The goal for all soda advertising is to specifically not get you to think about soda. They want you to think about a) not being thirsty, b) not being hot and c) how condensation on the outside of a glass, can or bottle shown in pornographic close-up and slow-motion will trigger both of those thoughts. On top of that you get some vague platitudes about happiness and youth. Anything AT ALL outside of those narrow guardrails and it's fucking public relations Armageddon.

The best case scenario for any heavily advertised event is to be momentarily diverting, but ultimately forgettable. You're not supposed to remember any of it in specific detail. Examination is the enemy. It breaks the spell. It's all designed to be an inoffensive distraction, the pointillist specks of which you are required not to recall. Ideally you kind of nod along a little, allow your nostalgia centers to get massaged open and then come away with a vague feeling of dry-mouthedness and the first inklings of how to address it.

It's a tough mode of existence sometimes for someone prone to over-thinking. Like I said, it's hard to understand what constitutes "living." Is leaning in to the consumerist path-of-least-resistance the way to go? Who says there's more integrity or honesty or "authenticity" in a life of challenge and toil in the service of... what? Contrarianism? Every generation of humans has been confronted with a system of expectation governed by law and taboo. Why is this one worse than the previous ones that produced chattel slavery, racial genocide and the oppression of an entire gender?

The cynic in me would say that the resistance itself is a feature, not a bug. Capitalism's one indefatigable strength is co-opting points of resistance into the consumer narrative. Every 1960s anthem to freedom and love has been used to sell something unrelated at some point. In general capitalism feeds on innovation to expand or create markets and marketplaces, but now even more specifically as it is driven by "creators" and their "content." So who says my examination is a path outside the modes of power and control and not simply another essential cog driving the whole machine?

I don't know. It's all too scary to consider sometimes, but one can only try, whatever the outcome. I can say, with a silent scream as I type, the only thing I know I'm genuinely terrified of is an unexamined life.

And snakes. And mice. And cancer, obviously. Just rodents in general I guess, not just mice. And sharks. Most kinds of fish. Open water. Hydroplaning while driving. Whatever the fuck this is. Dick Cheney. Earthquakes. Home-invasion.

OK, it's a lot of stuff. I try to drown it out by consuming more sometimes, but it's hard to do when TV is introducing new and exciting ideas like how I should now be worried about crock-pot murder.

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*or at least gave enough of a shit to make it look like she did.