Three-ring circus

Down on my luck, with a few scrap­ings to my real name and even fewer clip­pings to my vir­tual one, I took myself off to the end of that slow and once grace­ful meander, where the well-heeled lux­uri­ous palaces — built in styles of archi­tec­ture bear­ing their regal inspir­a­tion and car­ry­ing blue plaques pay­ing test­a­ment to the pres­ence of unknown dig­nit­ar­ies — sud­denly splay wide open, let­ting loose a seeth­ing mass of human­ity into a soul­less cir­cus of gaudy hoard­ings and incess­ant graph­ical blinkings.

Buy me, buy one, buy another, buy more. They’ll scream and shout until you do. You can’t take it with you, and the clock is tick­ing. There are only so many minutes remain­ing before you inev­it­ably decay into dust.

I tapped on the driver’s win­dow. I told him of my wear­i­ness, my bit­ter­ness and my ran­cour. I was full of hate, and the only solu­tion I could see was to try for assim­il­a­tion. I wanted to be accep­ted as just another anonym­ous fig­ure lurk­ing under cover of an umbrella, shield­ing myself from the grim­ness. He seemed to under­stand, and agreed to bear me in a funer­eal pro­ces­sion without end. Just round and round until the money ran out, until there was noth­ing left of me because I would have at last been eaten away by the clam­our of all the wor­ship­pers speak­ing in tongues, as they sought enlight­en­ment in the drizzle sod­den temple of con­spicu­ous con­sump­tion that sur­roun­ded us.

I felt dirty and used, filthier even in thought and deed than the fel­low trav­el­lers out­side my win­dows. At least they had a single-minded reason to be stand­ing stock still in the middle of this unearthly din, star­ing up in wide-eyed won­der at the mes­sages writ large, then writ large again. And again and again and again. Slowly scrolling them into sub­mis­sion. Mak­ing them believe each neon boast.

The wor­ship­pers’ faces were ecstatic, bathed in the pulsat­ing elec­tronic glow as it spilt out into the night and pol­luted the puddles beneath their feet. These people had come from every dis­tant point — places I couldn’t even ima­gine, couldn’t even pro­nounce — to see the sights and soak up the dubi­ous cul­ture, yet here they were cap­tiv­ated by cap­it­al­ism, rais­ing their exult­ant gazes to read the few words they understood.

Sony, Sam­sung, Sanyo and Sega are all alive and well, right here on the streets of Sodom. Wish you were here. Wish hard enough to hell, and you could be.