Todd : Demographics

If a person is like a lobster in a tank, then that person is hanging out waiting around for a patron to come and pick them, but more like a kid on the playground hoping to be picked for a team, not caring which team, just hoping to be picked as soon as possible because everyone wants to be desired, and to play and besides, they’re full of sugar. Some of those kids, like the husky one with the shiny shoes, are very popular, so they’d probably make good team captains. In America, everyone who is not home-schooled is like the aforementioned lobster and they all attend lobster school to learn how to be better lobsters than all the rest. Once they turn eighteen, they enter into the exciting lobster tanks according to demographics. The largest demographic is the eighteen to thirty-five demographic. Starting with the general eighteen to thirty-five demographic, Americans can be sorted into tighter demographics which will allow them to be more specifically targeted by more specific marketing strategies. Once the sorting is complete, the hunt begins. Americans are hunted, targeted, trapped, hooked, fleeced, tagged and released back into the wild everyday by corporations, and federal, state and local government.

Lobsters hang out in the tank and people who want lobster will look in the tank and choose lobsters based on whatever personal feelings they have about what makes a tasty lobster. Surprisingly, unlike Americans in the demographic tank, we don’t see lobsters in tanks sporting tattoos or NFL team logos, or any of the product brand recognition crap used to make Americans more attractive, and lobsters aren’t being injected with hormones, salt water, or any other additives to make them more desirable or profitable. All a lobster basically needs to be is red, and big and people pick the reddest and the biggest. You might think that Americans need to fall into a much more complex set of parametrics to be considered prime pickings from the demographic tank, but all they need to have is money. As long as an American has money, that American is plenty desirable and the patrons will do whatever they can to get some of that money. Once the American is picked and some of its money is taken away, then the American is thrown back in so it can make a little more money.

While we hang out in the tank, we try to make ourselves more desirable by buying whatever can make us more good-looking, smarter, more charismatic, cooler, more powerful, richer, and more famous. And as long as we have enough energy, luck, ambition, rhythm, passion, brain power, discipline, bow-staff skills, and talent, we will be able to reach our goals, and we will become more desirable to others around us, and we will make more money, which will make us more desirable to our patrons. If we can continue along this line until we reach the end of our demographic, then we can go ahead and be retired, and then, maybe, we can find out what’s really important in life, or not.

I wish it wasn’t true, but lots of people have lots of hang-ups about being desirable, and while they concentrate their efforts to these ends, feelings are hurt, precious relationships are crushed, and people are alienated, left in the dust of a loved ones chase for whatever they believe will make themselves more desirable. Failing to appreciate how much they are desired or, heaven forbid, deciding they are not being desired by the right people, they leave their loved ones behind as they pursue whatever will make them feel more desirable. They get to where they’re going; only they’re not all there. If they’re lucky, they get the thing that makes them more desirable and they can go ahead and be more desirable. If not, they realize they got a hole in their heart. If they can find something that will fill the hole their loved ones used to fill, they seize on it, trying to shape it and make it fill that hole. Hopefully, this works and they can go ahead and be more desirable.

Everybody wants to be desirable. I might be wrong and I wonder if anyone can help but apply to others what they tend to believe about themselves, but I want to be desirable. I wanted to be good looking, smart, charismatic, cool, powerful, rich and famous, but I was never endowed with any of those characteristics, and I never figured out how to make any of those things happen for me on a shoe string budget. It’s not like all I needed was more money, I also needed to have a lot more energy, luck, ambition, rhythm, passion, brain power, discipline, bow-staff skills, and talent. As I advanced through the stages of grief, I came to realize that all those things are not what life is really about.

Obviously, plenty of people do have an abundance of many of the aforementioned gifts, but such gifts may be as much of a hindrance to what life is really about, at the same time as they make the process of living, standing upright and taking nourishment, easier and more enjoyable. The poor little rich kid had a lot of stuff, but that stuff owned him as much as he owned it. He wouldn’t let it go, but I happen to believe that he could have let it go just fine and if he did, he might have been shocked to find that it would not let him go. He might even have had to fight to make it stay gone.

Tags: American, bow-staff skills, captains, demographics, lobster, playground, tank