Mall Writing: The Copywriter's Cut

My first attempt to make money without being technically employed consists in writing profiles about shops at a really important and expansive mall in Bangkok, Central World. Mostly to amuse myself, I wrote some profiles that are totally inappropriate. I'll post some of the reviews I'm sure will incur not a small number of cuts from the editor's swift and exacting steel as they come:

DSQUARED

Fashion Men

To describe the clothing line as anything less than maximalist would be misleading. With an eye for several movements in tasteless fashion over the last two decades, the designers [sic] at DSQUARED clash trite trend after trite trend, contradiction after contradiction, relentlessly, yielding clothes for teenagers and young working men who are probably as seriously confused about their sexuality as they are their aesthetic sensibilities--or perhaps more fairly for those who simply have penchants for camouflage, reggae, Canada, sweater vests and other men. There is nothing inherently homoerotic about camouflage, no. But one should not be misled by the male models advertised around the shop; though the excessively layered and vested model is not reciprocating the macho and totally platonic arm-around-the-shoulder gesture of his scantily clad (underwear, spandex) amigo, he's just being coy. Whether you have a thing for coal mining (re: featured graphic T-shirt of the month) or indecisiveness, this shop is for you!

Willful Unemployment

If my memory serves well, I performed my first job with the same dispassion, disgust, and anomie that I've brought to every job since, including the one through which I currently plod and from which will shortly escape. I'm not one to psychologize, but I certainly did not inherit my parents' faith in industry, so if I were pressed to point to an experience, rather, an epiphany respons ble for what some madmen might diagnose as a recurring malaise, it would have to be when I was fifteen years old, working at T-Bones grocery store, taking people's money, putting it in the cash register, giving customers less money than the amount they gave me, throwing sundries in bags, smiling, and meditating on the two 15- and one 30-minute breaks my eight hour shifts afforded me. Because those intervals of non-work time punctuating the stretches of work time were the preservers of my receding sanity, it became easy for me to distinguish two types of time: time spent working was monotonous, stupefying, painful. Time spent not working was blissful, ambrosiac, Life. The contrast was clear, between working and non-working time. Non-working time was clearly more preferable, so there must have been a perfectly rational explanation as to why I willfully traded a significant chunk, say, 0ne-third, of non-working time for working time: money.

Money had to be properly understood if I were to go on with such self-torture. It was particularly easy because I was playing with the stuff constantly. A woman puts a few frozen dinners, a bag of apples, six snack-packs, one pound of sliced turkey, another of sliced cheese, and a loaf of bread on the conveyor belt. I scan the goods. She gives me $35. I take it and give her $4.67. I take stock of the situation. The woman spent $30.33 on what could very well be her family's dinner for the evening and her child's lunch for the week, or $30.33 towards the (albeit immediate and temporary) sustenance of her family and perhaps an excuse (dinnertime) for that family to congregate, socialize, share. Generalizing backwards, these Nice Things were made possible by stuff like food (for the sustenance of those bodies), non-working time (temporal space for the occasion of dinnertime), working time (for the accumulation of money), and money (for the exchange of Nice Things, like food). So we can see money like this: money is traded for enjoying Nice Things. Working time is what you sacrifice so you can get money, so you can enjoy the Nice Things during non-working time. By algebralogical extension, we can juxtapose non-working time with money; the money you make is how much non-working time, or Life, you relinquish. Furthermore, the Nice Things you can afford with money equals that time you could have spent not working working, i.e., I buy a turkey sandwich for $5.25 and I give up one hour working to earn $5.25; the turkey sandwich cost me one hour of Life (maybe it would only cost you five minutes). Two tickets to a movie, popcorn, sodas, and two hours of unsupervised making out with highschool girlfriend in parents' car equals six and a half hours, which is totally worth it.

Therefore, currency is: the non-working time (Life) one gives up so one can hypothetically afford and enjoy (or so one hopes) Nice Things, however subjectively defined, during the non-working time one has not yet given up for the purpose of affording and enjoying Nice Things. In other words, one trades some of their Life(a) for Life(b) so that the quality of the latter is--in whatever scope or magnitude--better. The problem is that Life(b) is always smaller in quantity than Life(a), and yields a asymptotically decreasing sums of fulfillment at higher ends of currency accumulation. One cannot value the time given up not working for work just in terms of the money earned because that in and of itself is not Nice Things. This is a conclusion that Marxists and Capitalists can agree upon: Money is time, and currency is the physical medium that reifies the latter into the former, however crudely. One fundamental difference between the two, though I have no interest in exploring that chasm here, is that one camp values money more than non-working time--a group, I would venture to guess, that has an undernourished, ultimately frightful valuation of Life, too.

As such, my view of working-time, work, is fairly bleak, regardless of the work. Maybe it's because the Nice Things I enjoy most do not cost me a lot of money (in no particular order: reading, writing, playing music, eating, having sex), that when I think about how much non-working time I give up to working time, I feel confused or just stupid. Although the content of one's job might distract one from staring directly into the eyes of such a miserable situation (if your job, for example, is taking photos of beautiful, maybe naked, women), for most people, all jobs are work and work sucks.

For stupid virtues, like duty or gratitude or something, I maintain my +54 hour/week post at meager wage; I get my daily bowl of chow, but no time to taste it. As I wrote once in my inconsequential editor's column for my inconsequential magazine, I only enjoy coffee insofar as it is an aid to more interesting pursuits, like reading, writing, whatever. So what I get is a shit load of coffee, but to no meaningful end. Rocket fuel, engine, no destination. Daily, I acquire more rocket fuel. If it weren't for the opportunity I steal back from my working time to burn the fuel here, writing, the stuff would surely explode, and my sanity with it.

Fortunately, this is my last week, or last issue, working for the magazine. When I finish this, I will have demoted myself to copyeditor where I will enjoy minimal work and pay, but much, much more Life.

A still murky conception of love notwithstanding...

I have this psychosis-inducing fantasy of meeting a girl in Thailand I could really, truly--like objectively--love. This fantasy seems just as (un)realistic to realize here as anyplace. Different than desire, I never expect fantasy to come to fruition. The criteria I maintain for the fantasy girl I could fall in love with in Thailand is very tight. Observation of the slightest foul audio or visual cue triggers a psychosomatic response that starts with crestfallenness, moves to resignation, onto post-Thanksgiving-day-turkey-feast fatigue/nausea, and finally resolves at term-paper-due-tomorrow-noon anxiety. It is too often that my desires, language, cultural points of reference, and predisposition to what I consider gauche, non-verbally (un)communicative gestures don’t interface well with most people, which is actually fine. Well, it is fine here, in Thailand, because my frustrated expectations I usually find to be wrapped up in some kind of culturally interesting observation, whereas at home, they--my frustrated expectations--are wrapped up in nothing, and so kind of depressing. Moreover, I don’t need to find the fantasy girl I could fall in love with in Thailand; it would be a dangerous thing if we all made such demands of our fantasies. That I come deceivingly close to finding what I think is the fantasy girl I could, once again--objectively--fall in love in Thailand triggers psychosis, or whatever is that arrests my words and breathing and mental chatter when I think I'm visited by one of these specters.

(a)nationalism

I'm from America, and yet I don't feel like an American. The whole idea of a nation state is bogus, outdated, an idea over some 400 years old that followed a continental war, divided power among a handful of power lovers, created identities that the rest of the world would inherit by virtue of being born at a certain place and time. There is no agency involved in assuming this identity; we are elected or banished according to something like divine grace, happenstance, entropy. National identities still hold water for many people, but for those who live in and between the continually expanding pores of different cultures and places, for those who have a stake in creating themselves, such constructs feel unrepresentative and transparently thin.

If I am outside a place, what does it take to be inside it? Being born there? A family? A job? An address? A skin color? A mastery of a language? Or can it just be a choice: this is where I live now. If and when I leave, it will also be where I am from.

Should I Be Doing Something?

The gap in my gut weighs something. It’s a dense condensation of experience, a churning, a forge where sense of self is perpetually fashioned, dismembered, stitched. It is the arena where meaning, purpose, passion, and resignation wrestle; a vacuum that, like an 8-year-old at Xmas, forgets the presents as quickly as they're unwrapped. It’d be good if I could write letters to the past, (un)fill my gut so that it’s not there anymore, that hunger, that nausea, that pacing around the room, thinking about what book to read next, or who to call, but not really wanting to do either because neither really matter or something, so just pacing.

There was a guy lying belly-down on the sidewalk, the right side of his face flush with pavement, staring way beyond his cup of little change. One of his legs and both hands were missing. They—the guy and the cup—lay motionlessly, waiting for change, together. His gut silently screamed at the busy and important pedestrians stepping around them, he and his cup; his screams made us feel ashamed for laughing with all of our body parts beautifully connected together, for walking, sometimes unhappily, for making the sidewalk that holds his face, chopped up body, and cup so dirty. The sidewalk was very dirty.

The appropriate supplicatory performance of the wai is physically impossible without two hands with two palms and ten fingers to place together, fingers elongated, pointing upwards and brought directly in front of one’s chest, nose or forehead, depending on how fervently one wishes to to supplicate. But without hands, palms, and fingers, this—among other basic daily performances salutary to life in Thailand or elsewhere—is impossible. Unlike the guy on the sidewalk, I have all my fingers, palms, and hands, and I use them to work for a magazine about coffee, tea, and ice cream, somehow.

Chiang R/Mai Revisited

I've just come back from a business trip to the north of Thailand that devolved into a week of loafing. Coddled by the hills and breezes of the North, I, once again, confronted the obvious: Working in an office, no matter what cool stuff you think you're doing, sucks. I prefer sitting there in Chiang Rai, by the road, staring into the road-hazard light spinning insanely. The light sweeps through cars' windows, illuminating private interiors and strangers' faces for a moment, affording me a sense of motion and humanity that sitting in an office does all to suck away. My enemies are few: Inertia, Routine, and Habituation.

Mercenaries

We've been nesting behind enemy lines for a week now. "The emperor is sick, weakened" says the very confused Pencil Nuts. "We make our move and take him out tomorrow." Sauces tells P.N. to shut up, reminds him that he, P.N., is a fish, that his name is Pencil Nuts for a reason, and that he, Sauces, is the ranking grunt. Moreover, if he, P.N., confuses his role in this hierarchical binary again, he, Sauces, will tear Pencil Nuts a new one, so to speak. I made an abortive attempt to console P.N., assuring him that we'd make our move in good time, that he'd do himself a whole lot of good to try to get some rest in the mean time. He didn't even look at me. To suggest one rest in this morass is to suggest the impossible. He just put his head between his legs, plugged his fingers in his ears, and started humming chromatic scales to himself, laying his consciousness to rest in a cradle of autohypnosis. 

It wasn't so much the constant threat of ambush during our most unguarded and vulnerable moments that kept us awake at night as it was the steady diet of jolt cola and absinthe Vitality Replenishers (or VRs, not to be confused with virtual reality) with which we were equipped before deployment. So, you couldn't really blame P.N. for his mild delusion: Not only was the emperor not sick, he did not need to be assassinated because he didn't actually exist. Perched a meter above the ground, our bodies and minds squatted on a felled stretch of timber, teetering. 

A small rumble emerged from the hollow of my belly. "We need to eat something," I tried to say. Only drool and squeaks came out of my mouth. Fanciful Leprosy grabbed my hand, told me to take it easy, that I shouldn't try to resist it, to expend too much energy, that the near lethal dose of Shmorsels I unknowingly ingested would be expelled in a few hours, and with it, the hallucinatory affects crippling my sense of self and occupational duties. I stood up and executed a back flip off the log, ninja kicking all the while. I did this to demonstrate both my readiness for battle and seriousness of hunger. Nonplussed, my obtuse yet comprehensible tormentor reminded me this was primarily a reconnaissance mission, so I need not ninja kick, and secondly, the terms of our contracts, by which we voluntarily agreed to comply, stipulated we'd be endowed with no rations of substantive sustenance, but that we could forage and pillage as needed or desired. Damnit! he was right. I agreed and deigned to tell him as much, but the Shmorsels, or whatever it was that had taken hold of my productive language faculties, slew my thoughts just shy of cerebellar innervation, rendering my attempts at coherent speech and, by consequence, comportment, shamefully infantile. 

I stood, observing the dragons swirling above my comrades' VR (once again, not to be confused with virtual reality) helmets, carefully considering with which weapon would be most appropriate to cut down these beasts from hell. Swirling. Swirly. I thought, "the broadsword!" But oh, shit: Though it had the advantage of range in closs proximity and high hit/swing ratio, the hand guard was flimsy, so my hand would certainly be taken as a trophy back to the mead hall and gifted as tribute to Dragacornus X, or whoever it is these gremlins bow down to. Damnit! I'll have to use the fucking sling shot. I felt impotent as I reached into my acorn pouch, grabbing a handful of the stupid nuts I thought I had ditched a long time ago when I learned Back Flip Ninja Kick. I obviously couldn't do that, BFNK, here--no, it just wouldn't suit--I'd get incinerated by the fire breath before I'd be close enough to land my deadly blow. Calming down, I took stock of the situation, resolved that I was bad ass with the sling shot, that these unidragon-fairies had nothing against my acorns and general military prowess, and that I was a beautiful animal of the Earth, whether I could verbally articulate my hunger or not. I looked down at the verdant grass and inhaled deeply, observing the ground slowly swallow a sinking world. A smile spread across my face as I remembered that my boots, although now being digested by the soil, were waterproof. 

My feet are warm.

There is a god.