On Commerce (I)

Life is change, growth, ingestion and excretion, reproduction or at least its more-or-less pleasurable attempt(s). Life is movement, exhaustion, exhiliration, depression, attraction and avoidance, repression. Life is change and exchange, but not too much.

Life is not a metaphor for shopping. Shopping is not a metaphor for life. Shopping IS life, a series of perusals and selections and rejections, taking in and laying out, fantasy fulfillment and accomplishment of boring necessities and sometimes failure.

Marketers try to minimize the failure-depression index in your shopping experience by stocking and offering everything you could possibly want. You walk (or drive a cart) down the aisles of a big-box or super-tienda or mega-mall complex or a large artesanias mercado, dazed and hypnotized by the bewildering matrix of products and colors and shapes. With experience you may learn and map the patterns, internalize the paradigm, become one with the marketplace: a happy cog in the vast eternal infernal machinery of commerce and survival.

You are engaging in trade. Expeditions once fanned out across the ancient terrestial globe to discover and establish trade routes — which means, they went shopping.

Modern retailers try to tame and sanitize and denature that primal experience, replacing the cries of a suk's separate vendors with a wahs of themed muzak (in the US) or blasting rhythms (in Mexico) interspersed with announcements, calls to buy. The pungent mix of odors of spices and meats and produce of varying ages and intensity, and the BO of the throngs around you, are tamed with vibrant cleansers and air fresheners and spurts of fragrance.

Interaction with stallsful of vendors who wheedle and shout and negotiate is superceded by focused paid displays and talking shopping carts that direct your attention to specific high-profit products. Soon, unavoidable aural and visual messages will be beamed directly at your head to force the desired interaction.

But the processes within your body and mind and self and soul (if any) remain the same, fear and greed moving you to possess and consume and excrete and desire again and purchas again. Your drives for attention and sex and nutrition and status, your fears of rejection and alienation and failure and death, push you back into the marketplace. You shop. You live. You shop to live. You live to shop.

You don't run naked down a tropical beach, feasting on mangos and papayas and bananas and coconuts, fucking every passing person and most animals,, swimming and sleeping and shitting and singing whenever and wherever you desire. You are more civilized than that.

You exchange your time and effort and luck for money; you exchange money for the products of the time and efforts of others; you play your part in the omnipresent human metaorganism. Your place in the hive is more-or-less secure. You shop. You live. This is not a metaphor. This is your reality.

On Commerce (II)

No shopping experience is generic unless you make it so by only frequenting one facility, restricting yourself to the same purchases in the same environment at all times. Every shopping trip, be it to mall or grocery or swap-meet or rural fair, takes you through lost-and-found cultures, their artifacts and rituals and sacrifices. Every profligate spending spree brings you closer to invisible powers as you worship the visible.

Wander through a first-world major retailer, through their offerings of 'health' foods or pet supplies or power tools or personal electronics or games or candies or sexual aids or home cleaning products. Look at each artifact, feel and smell and grok it; and as you handle it, put yourself in another place and imagine its uses and misuses. Then buy it. Take it home. Do something unexpected and/or unmentionable with it. Pray with it, prey on it, praise it, prod it, provoke it. What do your actions and responses mean?

Shopping itself is a ritual; catalogs and sales announcements are the holy texts calling you to worship; the marketplace is a temple. You pass through the portals and connect with powers greater than yourself and powers within yourself. You follow well-trod paths of countless prior pilgrims. If the establishment is one you rarely visit, your journey may well be a pilgrimage.

In my youth, car kits and railroad parts and slivers of balsa wood were my holy icons and hobby shops were my shrines, . Later, electronics parts stores, then discount music shops, and eventually computer recycle centers. And book stores always. With changes in lifestyle and body shape, performance-clothes discounters. And places to acquire ethnic handcrafts.

My closets and shelves and workspaces are now full; I need bow my head only before raw foodstuffs, and only infrequently. Has my faith diminished as my commercial activity declines? Is my heart impure or withered because I look less longingly at articles of trade? Can I be saved? Should I be?

I long to travel to more foreign lands. I recent years I've thrust myself into piquant open marketplaces in southern Italy, Mexico, Guatemala, with similar rituals that are only roughly approximated at USAnian swapmeets. For a trade explorer, this is Getting Back To Tre Roots. I know many more exist, as yet unassimalated by the fierce devouring demons of corporate capitalism. No experience here is generic.

You can avoid such entanglements, avoid the sins and trancendencies of commerce. Merely live as an anchorite (hermit) and grow and make all your own necessities. Do not interact with other people; exchanges are necessary. And certainly don't expect to fuck a human or even an advanced animal; even female penguins prostitute themselves for a pebble. Refrain from commerce and you remove yourself from the realm of the chordata. Perhaps you'd be happier as a Borg. Resistance is futile.