Stinger missile faux pas

The plenary morning session takes place in Hall B, and, like everything else in Las Vegas, Hall B is enormous.
We all traveled to this desert oasis of opulence and kitsch to be educated in the mysterious and amorphous world of Supply Chain Management. I will leave Las Vegas having learned nothing new whatsoever about this numinous discipline.
No doubt this is due to my lackadaisical attitude, for everyone I meet there speaks highly of the event.
All I can remember is one of the speakers at the general session. He was a consultant with an ugly South-African accent who intoned that we had to stop our ‘north-south' approach to Supply Chain Management and that ‘east-west’ thinking was surely the future of the industry which would bring a cornucopia of blessings to our bottom-lines.
His voice rose in excitement and volume throughout his speech, and after a full half hour of relentless platitudes and unabashed vacuous piffle -for which he seems to be well rewarded- he ended with a keen new insight into the ways of corporate management when he declared, in stentorian voice, that all the large companies that were wise enough to meet with him have now decided on the radical new strategy of “listening to their customers’ needs”.
I know what you are thinking; in a rational universe this pretentious fraud would be booed off the stage for spoiling everyone’s breakfast,but instead a lukewarm applause from the audience was the response.

For sales people like me these events are excellent opportunities to seduce otherwise well-adjusted human beings into buying our service. This trolling for new customers is to be done later that day during hectic series of 15 minute sessions with pre-selected companies in a bizarre ritual which includes a bell announcing the pending end to each frenetic episode of corporate speed-dating.
As it turns out, half of the scheduled suitors-to-be don’t bother showing up.
I don’t blame them; they are here for the free booze which is the traditional finale to every business event and this is a nice, paid-for, break away from their dreary offices.
During the second day of speed-dating, a fat little man with an Indian accent walks up to our booth and, while I am in conversation with someone else, asks if we can “do” his meeting now, instead of the scheduled time-slot on our third and last day, because he has an early plane to catch tomorrow. This would be considered rude behavior in most settings but as his badge indicates that he is a VP at a very large purveyor of carbonated, flavored, sugar-water, it is obvious to all right-thinking business people that he is entitled to dispense with such trivial details as common courtesy.

Hall B is filled with dozens of round tables ringed by unassigned seats.
The waiters drift silently between the tables,filling coffee mugs and pouring orange juice. I am fascinated by the waiters at these events. It is as if they are invisible to all but me,and I don't understand why nobody pays attention to them.

One of the tables is only half-filled with a quartet of properly tagged corporate citizens and I take a seat next to a 40-ish woman after she acknowledged my formal request to join her troupe for the breakfast session.
Not bothering to read her badge I ask who she works for.
She explains that all four of them work for Raytheon.
I am doing all right up to now; I am wearing a suit and the small-talk at my chosen table is proceeding according to protocol.
As I imagine that her company has many divisions I ask for which one she works.
“The stinger division”, she replies.
This is the moment where my ruse fails and I am revealed as the imposter that I am.
I blurt out: “I always wonder how easy it must be for a terrorist to take one of those Stingers we left in Afghanistan and stand near a US airport and take one of the airplanes down during take-off”.
The Raytheon woman erupts in a brief paroxysm of hysterical laughter and then abruptly turns to one of her colleagues to discuss less unpleasant matters.

I realize my impudence.
One is never to question the actual result of the labors of others.
What matters is whether one is part of the tribe.
I finish my breakfast in silence, contemplating the code I broke, knowing that I don’t fit in and never have.

Colorful rain boots

They are everywhere this year; colorful rubber rain boots.
The young women wear them, for Fashion tells them so.

Fashion, that mysterious and demanding cabal,has announced in the relentless and monotonous tone of mass advertising, which assaults the senses though television, large posters with perpetually smiling teenagers on them, and that most nefarious and destructive of all media - the magazines-, that the children’s rain boots of my youth are now mandatory dress for the adult votaries of retail.

The patterns and colors on the boots are so multitudinous that I can’t recall having seen the same pair twice.

When I see a woman scampering by, with nervous little feet clad in these rubber ephemera, a vague impression of sadness and loathing comes over me.
They all fork out $ 100.00 for the illusion of individual choice by picking a whirly design in black and white or a floral pattern of yellow and orange.

Because of the work I do I know a thing or two about the travels that the rubber boots make from the factory in Qingdao or Shenzhen, stuffed in ocean containers and dropped off at the distribution centers in the US, from which they are shipped to the stores.

They cost less than $ 20.00 when they arrive at the stores, and that is including all the transportation charges and import duties and the salaries of all the many hands that are involved in carrying this precious cargo to its destination.

This is how money is made now, after it was decided by the captains of industry that they’d be better off when poor people elsewhere made all our stuff.
They could always find pompous morons like Thomas Friedman to declare that the outsourcing of our jobs was actually a good thing for us.

The young women, who for some reason never seem to look at ease, do not contemplate these minor unpleasant details.
They are, after all, successful members of society and this proud fact must be broadcast via clothing, footwear and various electronic accoutrements.

Conform Obey Consume

If you want to go through life like a mindless consumer slave, be my guest.
But don’t pretend that you still have an iota of originality or sense of identity left by picking a colorful design for your fashionable rubber rain boots.

The Prejean Blues

How does one get from a pea-brained, bigoted nincompoop, who is currently having her 15 seconds of infamy, to pondering the shivers of cosmic loneliness ?

Just leave it to me.
I can wind up blabbering on about peering over the edge of the abyss from almost any starting point; be it an expose of yet more corporate cupidity and douchebaggery, or the social merits and ills of patchwork gatherings for senior citizens.
If my mood is foul and dark enough, I can pull it off.

However, this time I may actually - purely by accident and through no fault of my own - have a point.

For those of you who avoid that horrid sideshow euphemistically called “the news” even more diligently than I do, let me give you a brief overview of the nefarious facts as they come to us through our laptops and television sets.

A contestant in a beauty pageant makes, as is so often the case, a faux pas when trying to answer the obligatory question that is cunningly injected in the otherwise shameless T & A fest.
This is done so people whose moral compass is in the final stages of syphilitic decay will feel a bit better about themselves after ogling pretty girls marching up and down the stage.

Hey, don’t get me wrong. I like watching naked ladies as much as the next pervert, but why the pretense ?
It’s those fucking puritans again! Without them we could all be saying on camera what we are all thinking off camera; nice ass, girl!

Some overzealous writer for the pageant gave Carrie Prejean, -who looks conspicuously like that other oracle of our time, Jessica Simpson - a question about gay marriage ,and she answered that she didn’t agree with it due to her sound, Christian morals.

A big hullabaloo ensued; she didn’t win, lawyers came rushing to her defense, a sex tape featuring Carrie masturbating surfaced, she dropped her lawsuit, and now a book about her ordeal graces the shelves of Borders and Barnes.
Meanwhile, for reasons I can’t quite grasp, some of our brothers and sisters on the right have seen it fit to make her a martyr.
Saint Prejean; tied to the stake in a televised auto da fe, condemned by the high priests of godless Liberalism for taking a stand for Our way of life, Christian decency, Apple Pie and wholesome, all- American homophobia.
Yet it is hard to make out whether her moaning is brought on by pain or pleasure when one of her hands becomes untied and starts searching the pink folds between her thighs.

Well, why do I care about this mindless trollop?
Why does she get to me?

Some years ago I was sitting in the lobby of a magnificent hotel on the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris’ ninth arrondissement, sipping my favorite liquor,green Chartreuse.
I was waiting for my colleagues to finish washing the stink from the day’s tedious sales meetings off them before we could venture out into the grand-old city for dinner, drinks and laughs.
A woman, about fifty years of age, sat on the couch in front of me and she was utterly mesmerizing.
I could not keep myself from watching her and she didn‘t seem to mind. In fact,she liked the attention.
Although she would not be considered beautiful, or even pretty by beauty pageant standards, her entire presence demanded attention and awe.
Her every move was deliberate, graceful and fantastically erotic, and she had mastered the art of sitting still and not letting one’s eyes dart about; she was in control, confident without being arrogant, and gloriously feminine.
When an American business man with a goofy smile and an ill-fitting suit came to pick her up, my hunch about how she made a living was confirmed.
Lucky goofball. I would have paid good money just to watch her sit there for a while longer.


Her sublime eroticism comes to mind when I try to picture the antithesis of beauty queen Prejean, with her fake breasts and her fake smile and her fake indignation.

Carrie’s sex tape shouldn’t come as a surprise. For women, feigning pleasure is a very marketable commodity, as is feigning joy while prancing around in a bikini in front of strangers who take notes.
Her claim to having profound moral convictions is never truly questioned by the cable news pundits, whose intellectual bona fides are never questioned by the purveyors of abdominal exercise machines and toothpaste, who are their de facto employers, and who -just like our heroin- only care about ‘the bottom line‘.

People use what they have to get what they want.
Perhaps I just ought to accept that.
Maybe there is nothing unexpected about some hypocritical dimwit milking her shallow and vulgar morals, as well as her tits, to make a buck and buy a large house before she joins the Big Compost Heap that awaits us all, and perhaps I am too demanding of my fellow primates that I expect them to go through life we just a smidgen of dignity and honesty.

Las Vegas

He wears his uniform; Docker shorts that are the same as his other leisure pants, but cut off above the knee.
He wears them too high, accentuating his already too large ass.
He wears a proper belt in them.
The shirt is always a golf shirt, neatly tucked in.
His hair is short and clean and since he is on vacation he wears white socks and white sneakers.

She is fat and dresses for comfort.
Once out of the air-conditioned hotel, she immediately starts to sweat in the desert heat.
She thinks no one notices but I can imagine the tiny beads of sweat bubbling up from her armpits where her pink, sausage-arms begin and between her legs, where her husband only fucks her on Saturday nights, after three shots of Jack Daniels.
He will be thinking of Jennifer Aniston.

They don’t walk.
It is more like a wobble,a stumble.
Their steps are unsure.
They look like sedated cows, not knowing that they are being led to the slaughterhouse.

In Las Vegas everything proceeds perfectly to plan.
All the staff in all the hotels and casinos and shops and restaurants follow their script with understated courtesy.
They speak only when spoken to as the herd must not be unnecessarily distracted from its purpose.

Once their performance is completed, the staff withdraws into the background where they stand eying the tourists like benevolent spiders.

The elevator that takes me to my room on the 32nd floor is fast and silent.
It doesn’t stop too abruptly to give you that queasy feeling in your stomach.
It stops perfectly and the doors open quietly and smoothly.
My bath is comfortable.
It has a sliding end so my neck is not at an odd angle.

Outside, on the strip, the cows stumble by, confused at what to gaze at.
There is so much to see.There is a fake Eiffel tower (no need to go to France).
A man takes a picture of a fake Gondola.
No one smiles.
No one is happy.
But this is where they are supposed to go on vacation.
They don’t mind not being happy, because it is comforting to be led around by billboards and the ever-present friendly staff.
They don’t mind losing their money in the casinos, because that is what you are supposed to do.
They drink exactly as much as they do at home but here it is a wonderful vice, not a shameful secret.

At night, the same cows shuffle along the strip, the hot dessert air, like a giant blow drier, stinging their eyes.
Their senses are numbed to almost nothing by the assault of the lights and the incessant ringing of the slot machines.

In the morning this macabre parade will start again like clockwork.

I write a postcard to Morrissey: “How I dearly wish I was not here.”

I wait for that crazy Arab man. You know the one.
The one we are all anxiously awaiting. The one with the ticking suitcase.
If he must come then I hope he comes here.
And when he opens his suitcase the desert will be quiet again under the immense, beautiful, blue sky.