Center of the Universe

Wow, I've been absent a couple weeks here, haven't I? I beg your forgiveness there, for you see, I have been preparing to run for the hills. As you have undoubtedly noticed by now, the end is near. You can see an apocalypse of one sort or another nearly anywhere you look, particularly if you view the world as I do, in an increasingly Dale Gribble-like way. And how can you not? I know I've been on this kick about how the Man is everywhere now, but damn! The Man is everywhere now! Even if it's not the government directly, it's one of their lapdogs, the military, the multinational corporations, or my personal favorite, the media. And what does media mean today? Well, there's your TV stuff, your alleged news, your mindless primetime trash where amateurs pretend to have talent, C-level celebrities dance, and lots of things happen on an island that nobody should ever give a shit about, but that's just the distractions. The real meat is in the moneymaking, and that's on the internet. And what isn't on the internet now? The big chunk of the internet is the old cliches, all the porn and pictures of cats. Either way, you can't click a link without getting a screen full of pussy. Actually though, the bulk of what you end up looking at is advertising.

That's not the scary part, though! The really ball-shrivelingly frightening part is how specifically aimed at you the ads are now. You think that's just good marketing? You think that's companies studying their demographics? No way, dude. That's McDonald's looking at your Facebook profile and seeing that you're a great big fat person and then following you around plastering pictures of quarter-pounders with cheese on every wall they can reach. That's Starbucks looking at the same pictures and seeing a guy with clogged arteries who has trouble getting going in the morning, and surely needs a veinte-sized double caramel macchiato with a shot of espresso, whatever the hell that is, so you get your Starbucks ads on every page you look at. And then every company promoting every diet ever conceived of by man takes a look at that mess, and they see a guy who hates the way he looks and wants an easy fix, a six-pack in six weeks without having to lift a finger, and you'd better believe you'll see every last one of those on the way to checking your e-mail. A month later, you've lost two pounds, and that's reason enough to reward yourself with a Budweiser...and another, and then another, and then there's a picture of you on the internet wearing a dress with permanent marker on your face, and Budweiser sees that you're becoming an alcoholic, but you're not quite there yet, so give that man another round! Of course, all that alcohol means you can't get it up when you need to, and the damn Viagra isn't working, so you need to buy a big, loud truck to make up for your sad little dick, and of course Ford and Chevy will be there to pick you up when you're down. Of course, you can't really afford that, so you put it on your credit card, which you'll never pay off, and eventually all your stuff gets repossessed and you're out on the street begging for change. But hell, that's just what the marketing folks get paid to do! It's why they make the big bucks!

You think that sounds an awful lot like a slippery slope fallacy, huh? Well, maybe it is. But this shit happens, and don't think for a second that it's not intentional. These people know what they're doing, and they won't stop doing it until you're pushing up daisies, and then they'll just hone in on the next guy. Face it, there is no privacy. They all know just what you're doing, and they know just how to exploit it and make their money off of you and then toss your corpse onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. The upshot to this is that you're not insignificant. No sir, you're the big payday! So enjoy knowing that you're at the center of somebody's universe, whether you want to be or not.