Veil Of Marketing Illusion

Ongoing deep discounts, sales, clearances and special offers build a sense of permanence

Continuous anticipation of quickly-forgotten weekends, holidays and vacations sustains us

The very newest constantly beckons us forward into a quite-obviously, endless tomorrow

A thousand advertisements draw each of us warmly into that timeless consumer firelight

Soothing background music hypnotically imprints us with eternal marketing mantras

Careful spins reformat issues into sound bites that the average 3^rd grader can easily digest

Within this media immersion, we dream ourselves passing thru eternity at these daily lives

Homogenized spokesmen blend seamlessly to envelop us in an easily-accepted and secure cocoon

Our lifestyles have reached a permanent climax in the pleasure-seeking 3 minute present

We pre-consciously dismiss evidence contradicting the eternal happily-ever-after diorama

The circle of family and friends bonds us tightly to a shared dream of unending belonging

The void lies almost totally obscured and unconsidered behind our colorful veil of illusion

We need only strive thru all time at becoming the beautiful models their ads portray for us

The infinite circle of merchant-stoked holidays fosters in us a comforting notion of immortality

Together we tread the great wheel of relaxation, refreshment and entertainment

And our bright mega-churches finance a seamless transition to a familiar eternal paradise

Next week’s episodes draw us forward smoothly without any static-filled interruptions

Stopping to smell the roses as we grab the gusto while living for today totally occupies us

The unknowable actual number of our iterations allows us to assume we perform an infinite loop

Cuddly and warm images help obscure the sharply-tattered edges that we must rightly ignore

The afterlife is marketed as the ultimate in all-inclusive vacations in a truly eternal paradise

Those who pass away are expensively packaged for the exciting but safe trip to come

Our powerful mass hypnosis mostly keeps any consciousness of the eternal void at bay

The rapid pace of change obscures well the tiny hourglass filling in right over top of us

The nattering of bobbing media heads lulls us into a comfortable sense of security

Advertiser-safe news holds our focus adjusted safely inside the blinders they so cannily provide

The cartoon theme of Personal Responsibility keeps the disaffected securely in the game

Sacrificing our reason frees us from agitating contemplation of any cracks in the mirror

There is absolutely no reason to think that this consumer lifestyle cycle will ever cease

We walk this treadmill seeing a well-lit and unending path towards the happily-ever-after

Socialists and creationists equally shielded from the near absolute zero of utter black emptiness

Even on our deathbeds we rest assured of an eternal well-being within these shared illusions

God Granted Me This Fairytale Serenity

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change”

I note, freed of that dark anxiety, the global mass extinction our over-existence nurtures every day

Calmly I accept the reality of a hotter, drier, dustier and dirtier world, where we all must live

No more do I trouble my mind over CO2 levels to which I must contribute but cannot control

I pursue zenlike tranquility, emptying my mind by flipping channels thru potentially anxious nights

Unregulated exotic chemicals in our drinking water can no longer disturb my meditative state

I placidly accept the degradation, poisoning and erosion of our precious soil by industrial agriculture

Loss of habitat does not threaten me, as I twitter safe and warm here in my techno-burrow

I gaze into that hazy and starless urban night with what I can construe to be a quiet satisfaction

There is a blind equanimity to be found in simply ignoring the poverty and suffering of others

Deep media immersion smothers and deafens any anxiety which might falsely overcome me

In a benignly-induced trance, I emptily partake of our grisly and unsustainable food chain

Verily does my true spirit rise above the ever-knottier cluster constituting our irreversible advance

God granted me the serenity to shut the hell up, bend over and take all that which I cannot change

I sagely accept that selfish vanity, greed and insecurity are key traits of modern day leaders

Endlessly repeating the simple mantra of You Cant Stop Progress properly spins my spiritual journey

I quietly condone piling debt on their futures while we waste the resources they need to pay them

I have learned that worry over our huge number of self-inflicted crises is but a false shibboleth

I can rightly get on with the future and leave our guilty past behind in a jumbled, half-forgotten blur

It is with a certain calm that I adapt the insensate gouging of good croplands into cheap stripmalls

My health and happiness have been enhanced by letting go my fuzzy and unrealistic youthful idealism

Trust in the wisdom of His inscrutable way has banished the awful uncertainty which beset me

I am able to drive right on past our decaying infrastructure without even a second thought

A vision of the seas as stripmined, unregulated dumps can no longer perturb my cauterized emotions

No more must I futilely obsess over our sacred, morbidly-bloated, utterly-wasteful military budget

I lost fear of bearing personal-responsibility for my own uninsured health and scam-complex finances

I simply cast aside the burden of wasted anger over our people’s ignorance, illiteracy and attitude

That I must work until at least 70 but will be laid off for good at 50 no longer fills me with dread

With the sublime detachment granted me by my meds I disassociate myself from humanity’s future

I have made a lasting peace with all the eternal, random, angry and empty noise we produce

Internalizing the temporal nature of our vast wastefulness allows me to see far without seeing it

Accepting our unique possession of eternal souls has revealed the wisdom of our divine dominion

Now I can embrace my tenured dull manager who remains willfully ignorant and bristles with venality

I can blandly cope with their artificially-induced stress over arbitrary deadlines on useless projects

I have been imparted the ability to disagree with a silence that they act upon as my tacit acceptance

It has come as a relief to see how easily I place ever more on that big pile of things I cannot change

God has granted me the wisdom to overlook, ignore, compartmentalize or be far too busy for

Their Phony Ecological Concern

So we buy a couple pockets of old-growth big tree forest and turn them into monuments

We’ll clean up one or two token rivers and plant a few fish and take many pictures

We can do a couple of clean coal projects and print a hopeful pamphlet on recycled paper

Maybe we could subsidize a model green suburb with garages back behind, in the alleys

A proof of concept community school or two should keep their expectations in check

We can publish voluntary standards on protecting croplands and leave agribusiness to self-regulation

We’ll study the decline and mutation of the frogs and make toothless scientific recommendations

Maybe publicize power plant mercury emissions so that industry voices a cleanup commitment

We’ll force cars to be 90% more clean and efficient, then put twice as many on the road

We’ll save threatened wonders by opening them to the miracle of corporate tourism

We’ll make cleaner snowmachines and ATVs and ask them to please stay on the trails

We’ll strive to recycle more paper to China to make our import packaging even cheaper

Some stamps with pictures of endangered songbirds will demonstrate our great concern

It’ll be far cheaper to say we are raising people’s awareness rather than taking any real action

We can pass more landmark legislation and then quietly fail to deliver on the funding, once again

We’ll slowly adapt our children to dirty water, fouled air and a squalid, littered over-population

We’ll call for comprehensive reform, created by lobbyists, and then poison it with unrelated pork

We’ll un-muzzle our scientists but let our corpro-media out them as wackos with clever soundbites

We can shout above the noise pollution that it is not an issue even worthy of any discussion

A greenish packaging change and an All-Natural slogan ought to keep our numbers up

Concoct phony market-based solutions to problems no free economy was ever meant to solve

Label it expensive and intrusive gov’t regulation and play it off against families, jobs and money

Showcase opportunities for a few starving children but don’t ever even mention slashing population

Talk of reducing emissions to 1990s levels like that would restore some kind of half-assed equilibrium

Promote a couple show species to star status even as our global mass extinction gathers speed

Propose a bulky, readily-subverted cap and trade scam instead of a simple carbon tax

Institutionalize calls for further study as a means for simply continuing on with business as usual

Contract out pre-determined research results and trumpet it loudly towards our own sales ends

Advertising our warm commitment to future, family and environment should gin up wide good will

We’ll trumpet a little renewable energy research while permitting more new coal-fired plants

We’ll say we’re good stewards but depend on higher property and sales taxes for our existence

Just ignore military recommendations and keep the bloated cash cow bases in our own states open

We’ll pay off liberatarian ranchers if a wolf takes a cow grazing for next to nothing on federal lands

Sportsmen will soon adjust to expensive, trucked-in, hatchery trout in dirty, drying reservoirs

We might restructure capitalism to factor in phony environmental costs to avoid socialist regulation

The MulltiNats will cure societal inequity by simply reducing all workers to a bare subsistence level

God Almighty, Sure: He’ll Resurrect Ya’

god almighty, you just bet ya’

don’t need no holy scriptures or blessed servants, truth be told

god almighty, yes indeed

omniscient and omnipotent, mindless, and just plain stone cold

god almighty, don't you forget

no truths revealed or tithes required

god almighty, step right up

no heaven, hell or rebirth awaitin when you’re retired

god almighty, hallelujah

got no mind that could even test your faith

god almighty, listen to them preach

there’s nothing there upon which their story’s based

god almighty, keep the faith

for they ain't no jesus checkin’ up on your case

god almighty, give us strength

heart as warm and deep, as empty space

god almighty, by our devotion

both good and evil as fictional as eternal grace

god almighty, clap your hands

already enjoyed that afterlife, before you even began

god almighty, raise your voices

those religions just fog your vision

god almighty, brothers and sisters

prepare to find out that god aint on no mission

god almighty, hear our prayers

there’s no mind to process what it cannot sense

god almighty, stand behind us

only our imagination covers their false pretense

god almighty, be a witness

our faint prayers got no place to go

god almighty, let us testify

there is no judgment of the river flows

god almighty, deliver us please

peepin only to each other as darkness grows

god almighty, bless us, oh, our lord

just as deserving as your most black of crows

We’ll Never Quite Reach Nothing

Human influence asymptotically approaches nothing as time approaches infinity

Even the effects of our own tiniest efforts cannot ever shrink to absolutely nothing

They can’t ever become smaller than say, the background radiation from the Big Bang

Their gracefully infinite approach to nothing is an enduring tribute to our wanton fervor

Still, even our greatest fall as far, and just as quickly, as those we deem to be the least among us

For, after all, there’s always another half the distance towards emptiness to which to decay

It doesn’t matter if the remainder is but infinitesimally larger than nothing

The ripples of our actions can be divided forever and still retain all their information

Concurrently, the amplitude of their influence infinitely approaches an unreachable zero

But the dilution of our acts is further complicated by their mixing with those of all others

For though they still exist independently, like choppy waves, they can never be separated

So well are they homogenized that they could not be re-distilled

So thoroughly are they mixed that they are effectively perfectly encrypted

Still, the reaction of our great deeds and shameful acts cannot ever amount to nothing

The time frame or the distance that they might have traveled quit simply makes no difference

Even the ever-decreasing density of expanding space cannot quite erase us totally

Verily, none of us can ever be reduced to nothing in the lifetime of this one universe

Our venal gossip passes unchanged through the eons and is still different to each listener

Drunken shouts will echo hoarsely thru time, each retaining every slurred and cursing syllable

Catchy advert jingles tinkle merrily on, unheard and unheeded across the march of time

The empty promises of our leaders cannot totally dissipate despite their utter lack of substance

The far-reaching after-effects of our numbing sports extravaganzas will carry on forever

The wondrous results of our faith-based initiatives will withstand the test of all time

The benefits of our wars of liberation will live on long after these noble efforts are completed

Just so, the marvelous dragon flies crushed flat on you car cannot ever really fully disappear

Even our everlasting beauty and truth persists despite infinite attenuation

Our context-free morals defy the test of time, simply awaiting their own re-discovery

The beliefs we held in some eternal heaven shall carry on, even though they are simply fairytales

And so we see, it’s really not for a cosmic nothing that we eat, sleep, shit, fight, shout and fuck

Namaste, Butthead

    नमस्ते

Namaste, oh, venerated Master of the Universe, the divine in me recognizes the divine in you

Surely you are the Best and the Brightest as evidenced by your truly transformational greed

Greetings, oh beloved next generation whom we have so carefully brought forth and protected

Soon you must ignore us as but irrelevant and doddering, purposeless and lost, old fools

I recognize in your greasy and sweating obesity the effort to attend to that internal eternal

Layers of fat distancing you from the illusory clamor of the too material and very temporal world

Namaste, oh wise and beneficent CorproExecs, meditating inside safely locked compounds

Your lack of morals reflective of the Great Void that you will so soon rejoin once again, forever

Namaste, to our eternally patient and long-suffering domesticated, vegetarian cousins

Our industrially-efficient, franchised holocaust surely earns each of you so much good karma

Salutations oh lawyers, your gifts wasted on forms of deliberate and unnecessary over-complication

Now that you hate yourself and your once-honored profession, I would almost share your pain

I bow to you - Fat and loudly cursing, proudly illiterate, drunken, redneck fellow pilgrims

May your ATVs and pickups, jetskis, snowmobiles, dirtbikes and speedboats always loudly bray

Namaste, rich and well-connected son whose only real job has been as a political sock puppet

Greatest success on your new career as elder statesman, we await your fairytale memoirs

Namaste, my criminal brother, clinging to your brutal lifestyle like a wet rat in a dirty flood

I respect your cruel focus like the looming empty eternity into which we are both certainly slipping

Yaar, I feel that overwhelming force which drives your greedy and so short-term ambitions

I honor your selfish centering amid this turbulent confusion that leaves us with but a hazy blur

I nod in admiration, holy snake oil salesman cloaked in odd vestments and stale traditions

Making an honored, tax-free living pimping worthless divine life insurance on fictional eternal souls

Namaste to my 1 billion brothers shackled to unspeakable poverty and inescapable filth

We could each share about 1/5 of a cent and exhaust the $2M they say I need for my retirement

Namaste revered arms-producing protectors, for holding phony bogeymen away from our shores

We dare not speak against fat annual budget increases lest we be labeled Soft On Defense

I watch in awe there, my target market brother, as you manage to ignore so many issues

Your Zenlike focus upon consumerism blocking out the squishes foolish socialist squeaking

I salute your botox and cosmetic surgeries, your hair dyes, implants and your miracle fat melters

For surely these all help you down that great Middle Way towards a wider cosmic understanding

Namaste young peasants working 14 hour days, sleeping 20 to a room who earn $100 a month

I support your struggle for a better life by charging the cheap goods you make but cannot afford

Namaste, all my fundamentalist brothers of every ignorant, uncompromising and angry stripe

I recognize your merciless, amoral righteousness as a but a short, violent prelude to eternal paradise

May your devotion to the mindless pleasure of explosively-empty corpro-entertainment be exalted

For just how far can it be from the enlightenment gained by daily repeating Om Mani Padme Hum?

It’s Technical-You Pay

The service contract said that we had to pay again even though they made it worse trying to fix it

No, your contract is subject to a binding arbitration with a judge whom we alone get to choose

Technically, we owe you nothing but we have decided to cut your charges by 20%, for one month

Why, we never dreamed our house payment could triple just one year into our new ARM mortgage

Our investment instruments are so complicated that only a no-strings bailout can save your world

Experts blame a computer error for today’s lengthy and widespread technical problems

We can get you a new phone overnite but you must pay for the old one for another month as well

Regrettably, our computerized credit model has determined that we cannot modify your bad loan

All these other power adapters are incompatible but we can offer you this whole new unit, at retail

Per contract, we are not responsible for our technical difficulties resulting in your service outages

I did not understand our trading instruments so I OK’d them based solely on their profit potential

You won’t actually know the exact charge until you get your first bill, Oh, and it will vary monthly

Sir, the bottom line is that you must re-install everything and all your work and settings are lost

This hot new gizmo is perfect except for this one little piece that breaks every time on all of them

They said that it all looks fine from their end so you really shouldn't be seeing a problem on your side

It's not supposed to do that unless you change something else but nobody ever touched a thing here

His said he was Bill but I couldn’t understand him so he put me on hold and hung up after 15 minutes

Their agreement says they are not responsible if it doesn’t work or if anything else bad happens

No, I didn’t read that 12 pages of 4 point font fine print legalese, I only listened to the nice salesman

Come to find out, that expensive warranty doesn’t cover anything that ever could actually break

Never understood why the media ran exposés on the same scams that they sold commercials for

His worth to the firm was incalculable so they guaranteed him millions - even if he failed or was fired

His lawyer said he relished a chance to clear his name but yet he would make no public statements

Their peasant’s 14 hour slave wage days making things they couldn’t afford was hailed as progress

Though their HQ was in Bermuda and their factories in china, their ads were all so very American

Their stock price rose upon the announcement of further cost-cutting led by even more layoffs

He said that their unintelligible legalese was not their scam but was required by the government

It seems the recyclers are losing money since it still costs too much to reuse their free raw materials

She never considered what happened when she flipped a switch so it really was no miracle to her

Though we won’t go into the details here, if you run the numbers you can quite easily see…

This agreement states you must train your offshore replacement to qualify for any severance at all

Even if our own experts disagree on what the tax code actually states, we can fine you in any case

This undiagnosed pre-existing condition disqualifies your claim and also, we are canceling your policy

Initialing here means we cannot be held liable for any risks we downplay, ignore or don’t understand

This says you cannot sue us but it’s really just so you might not even try if something bad happens

It actually states that we can cancel your contract anytime but you have no way to ever get out of it

You’ll Become Nothing In The Void

An insecurity-inflamed petty ego drove you like some vile moth toward the hot media lights

You will get to enjoy an eternal, unconscious respite in utter darkness, near absolute zero

The greed that drives you to such heights during your short, selfish life will abruptly end

Afterwards others will briefly find new baubles to live for, but you won’t be aware of them

The effect of the big lies you spread will quickly recede to the cosmic background level

You will feel nothing of that and neither will you ever be conscious of anything at all again

The  power you wield now shall be taken from you, at the very latest, just at your passing

Not to worry, that nagging need shall disappear, along with all the rest of your venal thoughts

You wont be punished for scamming them with bogus heavenly insurance for their fictional souls

For neither you nor your foolish flock shall dwell anywhere, any longer, for any time at all

Now, your too-clever loopholeing earns you a fortune and the respect of your one-track peers

But, there’ll never be any more over-complicating obfuscation down in the fine print for you

You avoided any contemplation of the infinite for your entire superficial, yet hollow life

You will have no need of thought and no mechanism for thinking, and you will not know

So you died with the most stupid toys and, yes, you actually did win this lame rigged game

But there’ll be no smirking HappilyEverAfter as your lifeless dust dilutes in outer space

You fulfilled that most sacred and holy of trysts and brought forth the next generation

Yet, none will perceive the eternity after all life on earth ends forever along with our sun

You proved war was inevitable and wasted absurd unquestioned sums providing evidence

You won’t even see you have no real weapons, no enemies to demonize and nothing to protect

You called yourselves Masters of the Universe and knew you were the Best and Brightest

That vain perspective will silently implode as you spiral into the abyss of Ultimate Equality

You made bribed deals, exaggerated claims, omitted details and hid in locked compounds

The suffering of your long disease was but a prelude to your infinite sentence to nothing

You mindlessly wasted, destroyed, polluted and consumed as much and just as fast as you could

Now, be spread randomly for unimaginable eons by the cosmic systems you so carefully ignored

You stood under lights delivering their script, usually believing the nonsense that you read

Darkness shall bind you, silence will fill you, and emptiness shall be your eternal state

You trumpeted Traditional Family Values, preaching that regulation would cost them jobs and money

You will not be greedy, you will not be scheming, you will, like me, simply not be, at all

Your schedule will still contain important items you just had to do, but whose time never came

Soon there will be no pressuring deadlines or over-commitments, yet certainly never any boredom

You stepped on them and kicked them down, backbiting and ass-kissing to that corporate apex

But the incessant greed-blinded insecurity driving you will be lost in infinite dreamless sleep

Surely the simple faith of your lifelong poverty will at last receive its just and everlasting reward

Yea, for certain, ye must never again endure suffering, grief, tears, pain, hunger or anything at all

Help Me Not To Hate, Let Me Just Ignore

Curb my hatred of the proud and scornful ignorance that loudly proclaims our superiority

Stifle my loathing of greasy car salesmen, lying real estate agents and one-track CEOs

Help cap off my intense disgust with monomaniac self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe

Shame on my anger at the purposeless noise from which we derive so much simple pleasure

Help me not to hate pale political compromise, as satisfying to all sides as cold oatmeal

Stop me from wasting energy railing against the corrupt nature of organized religions

End my bitter diatribes over the rapid and unconscious waste of all of our non-renewables

Let me blissfully ignore the brutal, post-modern efficiency of our food animal holocaust

Grant me relief from my wasted worry over the absolute non-issue of human overpopulation

Control my wish to club those falsely cloaking themselves in so-called Traditional Family ValuesÔ

Halt my useless ranting upon the utter unsustainability of our vapid consumerism

Help me overcome the overwhelming feeling that, this time, the sky really must be falling

Make me just ignore their canned and dumbed-down homilies read with smarmy & self-assured smirks

Enable me to silently accept an ever-filthier and even more degraded natural world, every day

Reduce my revulsion over the grant of divine souls only to us by the musty gods we alone invented

Deliver me from my pointless and weak concern over our agricultural soil microbe communities

Stay my hand from smiting the lawyers, accountants, insurers and financiers

Help me not hate the unquestioned spending of more every year on our so-called dEfense

Don’t let me attack our wise but pale corporate masters safe inside their locked compounds

Staunch my concern over such inconsequentialities as breathable air and potable water

Deaden me to the grating noise of their witlessly destructive gas-powered ‘wreckreation’

Stop me noticing as one beautiful and perfectly adapted species after another just disappears

Keep my mind from dwelling on blackmailed bailouts doled out to banks with no strings attached

Lower my unrealistic expectations regarding our own morality and intelligence

Aid me in not dwelling too long upon the microscopic insignificance of my own tiny voice

Help me not to hate the self-promoters who have to grab the microphone in front of the cameras

Show me I should not look down upon the ordinary sloth, ignorance and obese over-consumption

Quell the anger that arises when I hear the foreign tongues, quite at home in my own land

Let me not even bother to scorn the venal, profit-seeking of the entertainment or tourist industries

Save me from drowning in a rank skepticism fueled daily by all of those so very sordid current affairs

Quiet my rude sarcasm over our hi-def worship of hulking sports illiterates in skin tight pants

Quench my disgust with their never-ending Quick and dirty and the permanent Just for now

Stop me shouting over the stirring faux-patriotic music of their euphemistic sound bite hyperbole

End my squishy concern over all the things that are destroyed daily, without even being noticed

Halt my cynicism as their reasoned debates degrade into loud, twisted exaggeration and blatant lies

Help me not to hate myself so much for being so inextricably dependent on all these ugly things