My name is Lawrence Schubert and I am a shopaholic.
I am approaching Wilt Chamberlain status in my eBay score, and without help I may surpass even his accomplishments, albeit in my own field of expertise, which is neither sex nor basketball, but online shopping. Stop me before I bid again. I sign in and immediately hear the whispered suggestion Mrs. Danvers makes to the second Mrs. DeWinter as they look down from the second floor window in Hitchcock’s Rebecca: “Why don’t you-it’s so easy……….”
Commodity fetishism of all types has always been a weakness of mine. I’d have made a lousy Marxist. But my habits were relatively modest, confined mainly to flea markets, thrift stores, and the back room at Circus of Books until the internet came along and enabled my unquenchable love of obscure and outré objects of desire. Pottery and phallocentric Hispanic gay porn, both are ripe for the picking online, separated only by middle-class respectability. There is little difference between time lost trolling eBay and that spent perusing BiLatinMen.com. The only distinction is the labeling. At the former all objects are clearly described, while the latter proffers the fantasy, popular on such sites, that the tough hombres sitting around stroking their big churros and chomping each others’ corndogs are bisexual, though there is nary a woman in sight. It’s not really BiLatinMen; it’s BuyLatinMen. They’re not bisexual, just illiterate.
Unfortunately, there is no halfway remedy for the commodity fetishist.
There is no such thing as a little bit of eBay anymore than there is a little bit of porn.
Unless one renounces all, dons a loincloth and takes up residence under the Bodhi tree until enlightenment comes—and not at the Bodhi Tree, where bliss comes with sales tax attached—life is about acquisition in one form or another. You’re either in the game or you’re out of it. No wonder Marxism had such a short, joyless run. Even the Chinese realized eventually that Mao was a dead end and replaced him with Versace, and look at them now. Goodbye little red book-hello little red dress.
But let’s get down to cases regarding obsessive-compulsive online dysfunction: the mothership of them all is hovering in plain sight. Facebook is the perfect melding of shopping and porn all gussied up as social networking; the dark eBay of the soul. Everyone is selling something, primarily themselves, and everyone wants to be admired and desired. “Want to buy some illusions?” indeed!
I spend more time on Facebook than eBay and the other site combined, but at least with eBay I get a package in the mail, and with the other place I get to handle my package. I think that if God had wanted us to be abstemious, he would not have created the internet or storage spaces. My right hand may grow blistered and my left hand may wither, but I will die in a crowded house, a commodity fetishist to the death.
Chastity is for monks, restraint is for saints, and sobriety is for suckers.
You’ve got a friend in PayPal.
Life is a banquet and most poor bastards are starving to death.
My name is Lawrence Schubert and I’m going shopping.
No comments:
Post a Comment