Consumerism run amok: The Big Box of Friends
So I was at one of those uber-bookstores the other day, reading books for free, since the uber-bookstores make it so damn easy to do so, when I walked by what I now refer to in my head as "The Big Box of Friends:"
Yes, every episode of "Friends" ever made, all in one big box, which can be yours for only US$300 (150 pounds, 225 euros). Which of course got me immediately thinking...
Who in their right mind would ever watch all 240 episodes or whatever of "Friends" on DVD? Especially when the show can still be caught multiple times a day on television?
The only people who watch 240 episodes of a television show on DVD are people like me -- complete fucking science-fiction losers. And we weren't the ones religiously watching "Friends" when it was originally on the air; it was the slightly daffy meatsacks of the world who were doing that.
You know, the ones who insisted that a show about sassy urban singles end with almost all of them married off and with children, and with half of them on their way to the suburbs. Those meatsacks.
And who, for the love of all that is good, is going to spend $300 for the privilege on top of everything else?
No one, that's who. This Big Box of Friends was in fact designed for one purpose and one purpose only: For those with too much discretionary income to purchase as a gift for others with too much discretionary income.
When the Big Box of Friends was first put together and released, not a single human being expected a single other human being to actually use this product from beginning to end. It is instead a $300 excuse for one person to say to another person, "I was thinking of you recently," for the other person to stick on a back shelf in an already overcrowded den, and to promptly never think about again for the rest of their life.
And then I thought, Wow, has it really gotten that expensive to maintain the consumerist status quo? Has it really come to this?
Yeah, I guess so. Out there in the hazy white-collar suburbs of the world, these sort of dim clouds for me now that I can never quite seem to understand anymore (even after spending my childhood in one), this is what people are doing -- they're working their asses to the bone, 14 hours a day sometimes, throwing their married lives into havoc, missing their offsprings' entire childhoods, getting road rage from those endless hours sitting on a vehicular tarmac, huffing gas fumes as they wait for the endless tie-up of terrorist-supporting ecohorrors to all move up another inch, so that they can all exchange $300 Big Boxes of Friends with each other at every wedding reception and birthday party, and promptly all throw their Big Boxes of Friends on a back shelf in a den and never touch them nor even think of them again.
Is this really what all you people out there in the white-collar sections of the world are doing? I can scarcely believe it. But yet there's the Big Box of Friends in the uber-bookstore to prove it.
Okay, I'm getting off my high horse now; it's time for me to bike over to my friend Tom's Memorial Day party. Price of a bike ride, by the way, after purchase of my $60 bike: free. And a lot more fun than 240 episodes of fucking "Friends."
