1971, Long Island, Exit 50

#1)

That is not a Road Runner costume; that is a THE Road Runner costume. At this point in his life, the boy is waking up at 7am in order to make sure he is in position for The Bugs Bunny Show to start at 9am. He knows what Road Runner looks like, and he has a yellow beak. This THE Road Runner looks like a radish. “It’s says ‘Road Runner,’” says anyone who will listen. Even if one buys the argument, Mom, that there are probably lots of different road runners, the use of the definite article, THE, implies that this road runner on the boy’s blouse is Road Runner from the cartoons he watches. It is not.

All interaction is deceit.

#2)

The blouse itself… Even if it was Road Runner, which it’s not, there’s no way Road Runner would wear a satiny blouse proclaiming he was THE Road Runner. As it was once said by those far more learned than the boy: “Disco Stu doesn’t advertise.” A five year old shouldn’t have to worry that his costume is too meta. “Trick or Treat. Smell my feet. My costume is dialog about the nature of the signifier.” Besides, Road Runner is naked, free, and fast. THE Road Runner pictured on this blouse doesn’t even have a body to be naked with. Again, he is a radish.

Culture is a ravenous ouroboros that feeds off the assimilationist dreams of children.

#3)

When were these pumpkins carved? Labor Day? This child has not yet learned to delay gratification. Now all is decay. The child wonders, “How long before my teeth rot and fall out and I die?” Culture gives him candy as an answer. The candy is called Life Savers. The boy clutches them because he is pretty confident he understands irony.

Entropy will eventually rend asunder even the bonds between the molecules in your face.

#4)

The price tag is still on the big pumpkin.

All joy is commodity.

#5)

The flash of the camera’s un-blinking eye also illuminates the back inside wall of each pumpkin, giving each gourd a two-dimensionality that masks the trauma they underwent weeks before. They scream, but no one hears. They are now just images of pumpkins, trapped in a chilling rictus. A child can only ape their frozen grins as he, too, has been flattened by the gaze. Also, his hair looks stupid, and it will look stupid forever.

Guy DuBooooo-ord put it best: “…Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle, behind which his own life has been exiled, the spectator’s consciousness no longer knows anyone but the fictitious interlocutors who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole is his “mirror sign,” presenting illusory escapes from a universal autism.”