An American Lion

Kleenex anyone?

I love marketing. I love marketing almost as much as I love my guns, and I love my guns more than I love my children.

The only thing that keeps us from oblivion and lower phone bills is marketing. Without it, we’d be cavemen living in substandard caves without carpeting or decent furniture. Marketing helps us upgrade. Marketing helps us improve this thing we call a lifestyle. Marketing keeps us from being swallowed up by mediocrity. Marketing makes us all appreciate freedom. Marketing is love, and while it is true that all you need is love, if you have marketing instead of love, you’ll be fine for a while, until you get lonely.

I had to go to the store and buy Kleenex (yes, it was invented to keep soldiers in World War I from inhaling mustard gas) because I’m afraid that the four extra large boxes we have at the house would run out if someone got a snotty nose before Friday. While calmly and rationally shopping and comparing, I noticed a clever bit of marketing.

This Kleenex box is tastefully decorated, but square. Square. Boring!

Square box of Kleenex. [Yawn]

Now, I love Squarespace, but things that are square are dullsville, sir. Oatmeal and Orrin Hatch boring.

I shopped a bit further down the aisle and noticed something sexy. Something exciting. Something oval:

OVAL box of Kleenex! Get some! Bang! Awooooooooogah!

Oval things make me want go bang! Ker-pow! Ker-splat! Yowza! And then do a leap in the air and do a quick tap of one shoe sole to the other.

Whoa!

Here’s why marketing is love: the square box has 90 tissues and costs $1.57. The oval box of tissues has 82 tissues and costs $2.64. That’s an entire $1.07 predicated on the fact that we’re buying ourselves into an endless cycle of spiralling debt and environmental catastrophe. And, of course, much, much higher phone bills.

Now, do I feel like an idiot because I bought both boxes? No, because, after opening them both and discovering that they contained the identical tissue, which is the two-ply white, sized 8.2 by 8.4 inches, I realized just how wonderful this world really is.

Consume, my children. Consume, spend, buy and enjoy. Build a pyramid of your possessions that only you can guard with live ammunition, live for today, forget about what the world might be like in a few months or years, and let the heavens shower down upon you with consumer goods and free samples. We can live like this forever.

Forever.