I used to watch a lot of the Simpsons when I was growing up. It came on after Third Rock From the Sun, but before Seinfeld, and it was really the only show I was interested in. I haven’t seen very much of it lately, but from what I can tell I’m not missing very much. One of the main things I liked about early Simpsons episodes were the McBain shorts that were scattered around like little treats every season. I vividly remember telling my mother that I would watch a McBain movie if they made one. I feel as if a great burden has been lifted off of me now that I’ve seen the full McBain movie. It’s as glorious as I had hoped. …
Way out East there was this fella — fella I wanna tell ya about. Fella by the name of GIF Guy. At least that was the handle his loving parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. GIF Guy, he called himself the GIF Guy. Now, GIF Guy — that’s a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then there was a lot about the GIF Guy that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. And a lot about where he lived, likewise.
This reminds me of something interesting that happened to a friend of mine. Last year I was sitting out on my front porch when my friend rode up on a brand new, twelve-speed, top-of-the-line bicycle. I mean, this was the Rolls Royce of bicycles. It had an extra-padded seat, three dual-action cup holders, and a built-in tire inflation machine, so your tires were always at the perfect pressure.
I was a little awestruck at first. To my knowledge, my friend doesn’t come from a very wealthy family, and he doesn’t have any sort of job that I know of. Unless that bike fell from the sky, I really didn’t know how he could have gotten it.
Have you ever looked at all the things around you and wondered: how did I manage to collect all of this crap? Who made this crap, and why? The sheer amount of objects we own is preposterous once you look at them individually. Somebody had to come up with all of this crap, design it, get the materials, make the crap, box it, send it out, receive it, store it, sell it by the truckload to a retailer, send it to the retailer, receive it again, store the crap again, put it on a shelf for a year until you come along, and then sell it to you for a couple bucks. Keep in mind that everything that you own or have ever touched has gone through that same process. That’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself. You don’t have to hew all of your furniture out of solid oak logs whenever you need a new dinette set. You simply go down to the store and buy one.
It’s the same process with food and other consumable items, which is completely mind-blowing for me. Let’s say you want a carrot. Well, the carrot is planted, fertilized, tended to, harvested, thrown on to the back of a flat-bed truck, brought to sorting facility, packaged, sent out to distributors, and sold to you, passing though the hands of over a dozen people on its way to your home. Then you take one of the carrots out of the package, rinse it off, dry it off, and then drop it onto your dirty kitchen floor — now it’s ruined.