Choices

When you live in a privileged culture such as ours, where purchasing power generally exceeds that which is required to sustain life, people tend to buy things, which may not be absolutely necessary.   I had a neighbor once that owned an electric melon baller, my former father in law owned a magnetic petoncle (French bocce ball) retriever and have a little machine that shaves knots off sweaters.  Again, affluence breeds bad judgement when it comes to purchasing.    For those that decide that they don’t really require the obscure, then the wide range of choices available, for just about everything can appease the ravages of consumer lust.

There is an ice cream place in town that has over one hundred flavors.  The perceived prowess from the perspective of the consumer lies in potential ability to purchase absolutely any of these to satisfy any possible whim.  I can have whatever I want!  The obvious downside, however, is that they can’t all be winners. If you happen to go there, don’t try the Calamari Peach or the Banana Anchovy.   Likewise if you go to Safeway to get a little cream cheese to go with your lox you’ll probably be overwhelmed at some of the bizarre combinations of flavors that have been engineered.  The same is true for potato chips, which have about the same profit margin as street drugs.  One potato can yield about fifty, twenty-eight gram bags.  Again the flavor range is quite broad.   Salad dressings are the same, more flavors than you can shake a carrot stick at.   What I wonder about is given some of the absurd concoctions that are actually marketed, what are some of the ones that didn’t quite make the cut in the food testing lab.  Cramy Cucumber is in, sorry Lumpy Leek didn’t make it.  The mind boggles.

If you go and buy a pacemaker, you have a choice of two.  They both work very well.  Their designs have been extensively examined and their performance has been exhaustively tested. You pick the best one of the two for you, and that’s all you need. They send measured doses of electricity to your heart to contract your ventricles so that your blood circulates.  If the pacemaker fails, you end up in an urn.  Urns come in thousands of shapes and colors.  Pacemakers have a limited product line because they are not visible.  If they were, they would come in thousands of shapes and colors as well.  If they did, some would not be as good as others so there would be a lot more urns around too.  So what’s with all that then?   Adultery!

Yes, we are unable to have long-term monogamous relationships with fashion and color.  We’ll have a new fling with a silk tie in this fall’s new colors but by May we’re surfing the net for new shapes and colors in the Boboli catalogue hoping not to be caught by any of the other members of the household.  But men are not as bad as women.  Makita power tools only come in one color.  Do we really need 16,000 shades of lipstick?  Is it necessary to have an analytical chemist train for eight years so that he can go to work for Revlon and discover a new shade of Pastel Plum Pink?   So the advice to be given to men who stray from monogamous relationships, and are caught, is to be aware of women’s nefarious, adulterous attitudes towards color.  Ask them, “So how many shades of nail polish have YOU used in the last year.” and you will be exonerated - or maybe she will end up shopping for an urn for you in this year’s color.

Cell phones also come in a variety of styles and colors.  Mine actually comes with covers in three different colors.  I hadn’t realized this before so I switched to the blue one hoping that it would improve reception in the non-upstairs-bathroom areas of my home.  It didn’t, but it tied in nicely with the color of the trim around the kitchen.

Toilets and toilet seats also come in a wide range of colors.   That is to be expected, but what really surprises me is that they are all the same size.  The last time I checked, which is quite seldom, except perhaps in the summer months at certain resorts, the human backside comes in quite a range of sizes.  Apparently it’s more important to have a lid that matches your curtains that a seat that fits your keister.  Personally, I find it more important to have a toilet seat that will support your weight when you’re climbing up onto the tank to talk on your cell phone.

There are similar size range problems for chairs, theatre seats, and airline seats.  One size fits all!  Not bloody likely. In the US they have come to realize that, even though all the airline seats are the same, the airlines have made seat belt extenders available to those passengers with ample adipose endowments.  That still doesn’t solve the problem of the seat itself.  I suppose their thinking is that one should be purchasing as many seats as required depending on butt size, which would be limited to three on most aircraft.  That’s nothing to laugh at.  A larger person could ride in comfort and be entitled to three 14 gram packets of pretzels for dinner.

I once paid a large sum of money to be somewhere I didn’t want to be with someone I didn’t want to be with.  We’ve all done this.  It’s called wanting to impress, whom I don’t know.   It was a showing of Cabaret with Joel Grey.  Not really my style. I would have been happier at a tractor pull but whatever … When we arrive at our seats we realize that a very large man is sitting next to one of them, again one size does not fit all.  This guy had his own postal code. He was literally overflowing into what would end up being my seat.  I couldn’t ask my date to sit there.  I didn’t like her very much but since the prospect of potential sex was not unpalatable I played the gentleman.

I am a person that generally does not like being touched by others.  There are limited exceptions to this but that depends on what is being touched and who is doing the touching.   I did not want to touch or be touched by this giant man.  I slid into my seat at an angle resting on my left hip with my right butt cheek against the armrest on the right side.  I then arched my spine to the right and tucked my shoulder down and back.  There had been no contact yet but I could feel myself being sucked into his gravitational field.  So far, so good.  I couldn’t breathe, but the show was only two and a half hours long.

After about 45 seconds, chaos theory took over.  My date caressed my little finger with hers just as I was about to shift down and to the right so that I could take my first breath.  The little distraction caused me to quickly look towards her, triggering severe muscle cramps in my shoulder and abdomen.  I uttered an explosive snort as my oxygen deprived lungs drew in the volumes of air they were yearning for.  This conveniently happened during a silent portion of the show so now I had an audience, giving me the opportunity to experience public humiliation along with physical and emotional distress.  The man in front of me was wearing a toupee.  It almost got sucked up my nose.  The spasms in my clenched abdomen and shoulder made me lose complete muscular control and I fell into the fat man.  It wasn’t exactly a fall of catastrophic proportions in physical terms but it felt like I fell from 1000 psychological feet.   I collapsed sideways a few inches and became one with him.   I felt like I had been dropped into a pond of warm pudding.  Everything was quiet and warm.  Everything wobbled a little from the original impact and then came to rest.  I don’t think he notice a thing.  The union with him lasted the entire evening.  Every time he laughed, I jiggled and I eventually developed motion sickness.