Yeah hi.

I’ve come to talk to you about your relationship with consumption.

I’m talking about the little slogans and catchy buzzwords smeared all over wanky products to make you buy them even though they are useless and arbitrary. Those chirpy little witticisms that are devised and agreed upon in meetings and brainstorming sessions by teams of marketing post-graduates all across the face of the earth.

I can’t tell if someone is taking the piss out of us all or if we in fact are the sheep donkey hybrids that we are taken for, inanely chasing the proverbial carrot around and around, forever and ever, without a moment’s hesitation to take a step back and look at the sweaty carousel of deceit which we are all skewered to. Or have we become so over-exposed that ludicrous marketing ploys don’t even register and we just numbly acquire what we need to continue along our meandering paths to oblivion?

Regardless of the answer to this most uninteresting of conundrums, I wish to explore a few choice examples of the moral bankruptcy these little pissbastards make us wade through on our sad little journeys. Care to join me?

This morning as I lay Whitney-esque in my grey bath-tub in the bathroom of my utilitarian hovel I glanced away from my bloated corpse and found that my gaze had landed upon my housemate’s FCUK body wash. Apparently this particular brand of liquid soap has an “Urban Fragrance”. An urban fragrance. What does this mean? Is it only for those of us lucky enough to live in city centres? And what does it smell of? Is it extraordinarily corrosive in order to more effectively dissolve the layers of grease we find slathered all over us in the filth and the fury of our urban environment? No? Well then does it actually smell urban? I don’t know about anyone else but I don’t think I want to smell like chip shops and despair.

And what about our poor cousins on the estates? Did FCUK take a second to think about their specific personal hygiene requirements? I hope so. Can they get an FCUK body wash with a “Suburban Fragrance”? That smells of Volvos and shit barbecues.

And, furthermore, what about our friends in the East? The tractor people. The amish people that live in the countryside and sell us bread and sausages. They must get extra dirty and smelly always rolling about in all that pig shit. What happens if they, on their way to pick up their FCUK “Rural Fragrance” Bodywash on their bi-monthly trip to Morrisons, aren’t concentrating and pick up the Urban one by accident? What will they do when they get back to their straw huts? They’ll have to get their waders on again and trudge back through the Dickensian marshes to get it changed. It’s just problematic really isn’t it?

This particular choice of branding is crass and insipid and it is socially divisive. It is also very dangerous and irresponsible. We can all count ourselves lucky if this controversy is not the spark that ignites a 21st century class war.

Anyway, thankfully it hasn’t yet, so I guess we can continue. Astounded at how dumb FCUK thinks I am, I decided to see what other marketing wet-nightmares I have foolishly and unwittingly succumbed to. It can sometimes be hard to stay vigilant.

In my kitchen cupboard is a can of cat food which claims, quite immodestly, that eight out of ten cats prefer Whiskas*. Do they? My mind boggles at the groundbreaking journey of pioneering science that must have gone into quantifying this staggering assertion.

My cat is so stupid. Like so stupid. He is frightened of slippers. The concept of preference isn’t even on his radar. He has no language, he thinks in images and instincts. The fact that cat food even exists is lost on him. It’s just the brown stuff that goes in the front-hole. If quizzed on his favourite type he would respond only in bewilderment and perhaps aggression. How have this cat food company extracted this information from enough cats to boldly state that eight out of ten prefer their brand? I am so confused.

After pondering this for too long I had to go to work to receive a delivery from the beer delivery people. I don’t know if any of you have heard about this new fatigue medicine which is available in every outlet of any kind across the galaxy. I had some delivered to work today. It’s called Red Bull. It gives you wings.

What?

All my life I have literally dreamt of this day. The miracle of unaided flight has long been a fantastical ambition of mine. You know like some people would love to be invisible or something? Presumably so they can be better perverts or burglars. I have always wanted to be able to fly. Like a majestic falcon through the moonlit night, high above the whirling maelstrom. This yearning could have been satiated years before now had I simply just drunk some of this miraculous potion. I can’t wait to try it tomorrow. Look out for me as I make my first avian journey from the top of Canary Wharf.

Hopefully they weren’t referring to the potentially lethal combination of caffeine, taurine and sugar which may or may not focus your mind and body till you are like Brad Pitt in that famous film about Achilles vs. Chopper.

Also available from my inebriation station is an American yellow beer called Budweiser. It apparently is King of the Beer people. This is pretty cool. Which beer is the Queen? Corona? What about Layman of Beer? Who does that title go to? Fosters, Carlsberg? Peasant of the Beer Kingdom? Skol? If the beer people had created a system of social meritocracy in which to co-exist then the self appointed Dictator King may have found himself somewhere else, somewhere more uncomfortable in the Beer people’s hierarchy of power. Given that Budweiser is fvcking shit I think he would probably be the Perpetually Incarcerated Career Criminal Tax Cheat Racist Homophobe of Beers.

Then again who knows? George W. Bush got elected King of America twice. I bet he likes Budweiser.

Upon receipt of the stock delivery I had to pay for it. Obviously. So I flopped out my big swingin’ Mastercard. Apparently there are some things that money can’t buy but for everything else there’s Mastercard.

And here I’ve been all these years struggling to scrape together all my scrubby little pennies in order to participate in this hostile modern bartering system, restricted by my own sloth, the greed of the various merchants I have found myself in engagement with and the arctic economic tundra into which I was spawned. All these years I’ve been kicking against the pricks trying to make the ends of my ever-shortening belt meet. All these long years. Out in the cold. I thought everyone else looked happier than me. Why didn’t someone tell me?

All I needed was a pissing Mastercard and the world would have been mine. Like Suffolk’s own Tony Fvcking Montana. Say hello to my little Mastercard.

Anyway, as I find myself struggling to make sense of the world around me, one question remains unanswered, lingering above the confusion.

Am I taking things too literally?

*artistic license employed to devastating effect.