Artificial Imperatives, Optimists, Gamblers, and the Well Scrubbed Brain

Alas, like millions of Americans in 29 different states, my dream of winning the $365 million record Powerball lottery Saturday night was in tatters Sunday morning. Walking into my local retail liqueur store, I knew my chances were near non-existent, but opened my billfold, brushed away the moth that few out, and plunked two crumbled greenbacks on the counter anyway, even joking with the vendor that I was still running a perfect negative record, having won a pitiful $2 years ago for guessing that laggardly little last number - the real Power number that is more like a wee hiccup on the road to Nirvana.

We are amazing optimists and invenerate gamblers, as we prove every time we steer our vehicles into the mayhem that is city traffic or expressway madness or don't look for an oncoming bus when we step off the sidewalk. Something about us just wants to believe that the stars will align, the dice will roll to our will, fate will wear a smiley face, and life's slot machine will stop on three cherries with no pits. Instead, we end up repeating the empty cliche that it's not how you win, but how much you pay to play and if you're still standing - and wearing a shirt - at the end of the game.

Remember chain letters? Recall the addlepated prose that promises you luck or wealth beyond all imagining if you'll just send the letter to 2,354 good friends in the next 20 seconds? Or, if you ignore it and miss the deadline, a deadly virus will enter your body through your left ear bringing excruciating pain and debilitating diarrhea as it wends its way toward your crotch and withers and rots your genitila? Well, state run lotteries, casinos and riverboats, four-color magazine ads or TV commercials for automobiles, cosmetics, legal pills, beer and singles connections are the chain letters of the modern age.

We live in an artificial world of phony promises, yet optimists and gamblers that we are, we bite every time for those messages. Rubba, rubba, scrubba dub dub. The well washed brain at work.

Everyone enamored with the idea of reaching out to touch someone has spent enough on cell and digital phones, answering machines and voice mail, caller ID and call waiting, 900 numbers and the love connection hot lines to have traveled to Ireland at least 542 times to rub the Blarney Stone. We haven't touched so much as harassed and been harassed. Everyone who accepts the network come on of 'Must See TV' has sprawled on their sofa to eat junk food and stare at inanities for several hours when they could have been out and about making real 'Friends' who might actually come to visit, or lend a hand in a crisis, or at least send a Hallmark card (the very best) on your birthday or at Christmas.

Stop and think just a moment about Super Bowl Sunday...that curious day of celebration, beer and unending overly expensive commercials. Suddenly, because of the price tag and the hype, those ads you usually skip over or use as a pause to raid the fridge, now get more attention than the 22 banged and juiced up players on the field. And they have the temerity to ask us to pick our favorite commercial and we have the warped brains that comply!! Talk about an artificial imperative that erodes your will.

We are so bombarded with exhortions to buy, buy, buy. No matter what ails us, the cure is there in a new car, in a total home make-over, in a brand new wardrobe, a shipload of cosmetics, or the pharmaceutical company's pill to relieve symptoms of the illness de jour. We're so optimistic, we believe, and plunk down our hard earned cash for a host of things that rarely solve our problems or make us look better, feel better, act better or better attract the opposite sex.

Men keep gambling that a new muscle car will lengthen their penis and turn them into Casanova. Women keep gambling that a tummy tuck, cosmetic surgery, or $2,500 worth of night creams and blusher will make them irresistible. Sorry folks, but your brainwashed willingness to believe and to gamble only makes you irresistible to all those businesses with something to sell...and that something is rarely anything you actually want or need.

Remember those high flalluting CEO's who ran their companies into the ground, absconded with employee pensions, defrauded the government, and embezzled company funds convinced they'd never get caught with those two sets of books? You remember what most of them did with all that money they took? They bought 'stuff!!' They fell for all the hype and phony promises, too, thinking the accoutrements of sophistication, the trappings of gentility, the glossy appearance of trophy wives or tans on the golf course would make their petty mentality special. The miserable bastards and sad sacks bought stuff. Good grief. Their brains had been so well washed, it's doubtful an honest or original blip would have appeared on an EEG.

Face it. We've all been artificially inseminated. We've become the retard children of the advertising age. We kowtow to the marketing genius' hired by big business to keep them in obscene profits while they keep both adults and children enthralled with empty promises. The business of business might only be business, but the results of this kind of business is that we bloat our little lives with 'stuff.' With wide eyed wonder, we buy what they offer, use it a while, realize nothing much has changed, and then double down on our bet, and buy something else that won't work for us either.

No business wants any of us secure with our selves or comfortable with how we appear to ourselves or each other. These companies are not finding water in the desert. They're not working to cure cancer or explore space for colonization. They are not interested in ways to get us away from gas guzzling cars with internal combustion engines. They are simply re-working and repackaging the 'stuff' that's worked before. They're finding a new way to get their messages about 'stuff' believed. They're in collusion together and working in tandem with banks, accountants, lobbyists, ad agencies, the media and a host of peripheral business to simply keep us lathered up so scrubba, scrubba and rub a dub dub will sell us all more 'stuff.'

Before you dream of how you'd spend a huge lottery win on lots of 'stuff,' maybe you should take time to douse your brain with cold water and rinse.