your Zeta Delt T-shirt. The flavor of melted silver and pink bubblegum. It’s sleep apnea only in the day, and you need to remind yourself to take the next breath…take another breath…while the supermodels walking on sparkle high heels try pimping the audience a microwave oven, pimping a treadmill while you keep staring to decide if they’re really good-looking. They make you spin this doohickey so it rolls around. You have to match a bunch of different pictures so they go together perfect. Like you’re some white rat in Principles of Behavioral Psychology 201, they make you guess what can of baked beans costs more than another. All that fuss to win something you sit on to mow your lawn.
Thanks to your mom telling you prices, you win a thing like you’d put in a room covered in easy-care, wipe-clean, stain-resistant vinyl. You win one of those deals people might ride on vacation for a lifetime of wholesome fun and family excitement. You win something hand-painted with the Old World charm inspired by the recent release of a blockbuster epic motion picture.
It’s the same as when you felt sick with a high fever and your little-kid heart would pound and you couldn’t catch your breath, just from the idea that somebody might take home an electric organ. No matter how sick you felt, you’d watch this show until your fever broke. All the flashing lights and patio furniture, it seemed to make you feel better. To heal you or to cure you in some way.
It’s like forever later, but you win all the way to the Showcase Round.
There, it’s just you and the old granny wearing the sweatshirt from before, just somebody’s regular grandma, but she’s lived through world wars and nuclear bombs, probably she’s saw all the Kennedys get shot and Abraham Lincoln, and now she’s bobbing up and down on her tennis shoe toes, clapping her granny hands and crowded by supermodels and flashing lights while the big voice makes her the promise of a sport-utility vehicle, a wide-screen television, a floor-length fur coat.
And probably it’s the acid, but it’s like nothing seems to add up.
It’s like, if you live a boring-enough life, knowing the price of Rice-A-Roni and hot dog wieners, your big reward is you get to live for a week in some hotel in London? You get to ride on some airplane to Rome. Rome, like, in Italy. You fill your head full of enough ordinary junk, and your payoff is giant supermodels giving you a snowmobile?
If this game show wants to see how smart you really are, they need to ask you how much calories in a regular onion–cheddar cheese bagel. Go ahead, ask you the price of your cell phone minutes any hour of the day. Ask you about the cost of a ticket for going thirty miles over the speed limit. Ask the round-trip fare to Cabo for spring break. Down to the penny, you can tell them the price of decent seats for the Panic at the Disco! reunion tour.
They should ask you the price of a Long Island Iced Tea. The price of Marcia Sanders’s abortion. Ask about your expensive herpes medication you have to take but don’t want your folks to know you need. Ask the price of your History of European Art textbook which cost three hundred bucks—fuck you very much.
Ask what that stamp of Hello Kitty set you back.
The sweatshirt granny bids some regular amount of money for her showcase. Just like always, the numbers of her bid appear in tiny lights, glowing on the front of her contestant desk where she stands.
Here, all the Zeta Delts are yelling. Your phone keeps ringing and ringing.
For your showcase, a supermodel rolls out five hundred pounds of raw beefsteak. The steaks fit inside a barbecue. The barbecue fits onboard a speedboat that fits inside a trailer for towing it that fits a massive fifth-wheel pickup truck that fits inside the garage of a brand-new house in Austin. Austin, like, in Texas.
Meantime, all the Zeta Delts all stand up. They get to their feet and step up on their audience seats cheering and
Thanks to your mom telling you prices, you win a thing like you’d put in a room covered in easy-care, wipe-clean, stain-resistant vinyl. You win one of those deals people might ride on vacation for a lifetime of wholesome fun and family excitement. You win something hand-painted with the Old World charm inspired by the recent release of a blockbuster epic motion picture.
It’s the same as when you felt sick with a high fever and your little-kid heart would pound and you couldn’t catch your breath, just from the idea that somebody might take home an electric organ. No matter how sick you felt, you’d watch this show until your fever broke. All the flashing lights and patio furniture, it seemed to make you feel better. To heal you or to cure you in some way.
It’s like forever later, but you win all the way to the Showcase Round.
There, it’s just you and the old granny wearing the sweatshirt from before, just somebody’s regular grandma, but she’s lived through world wars and nuclear bombs, probably she’s saw all the Kennedys get shot and Abraham Lincoln, and now she’s bobbing up and down on her tennis shoe toes, clapping her granny hands and crowded by supermodels and flashing lights while the big voice makes her the promise of a sport-utility vehicle, a wide-screen television, a floor-length fur coat.
And probably it’s the acid, but it’s like nothing seems to add up.
It’s like, if you live a boring-enough life, knowing the price of Rice-A-Roni and hot dog wieners, your big reward is you get to live for a week in some hotel in London? You get to ride on some airplane to Rome. Rome, like, in Italy. You fill your head full of enough ordinary junk, and your payoff is giant supermodels giving you a snowmobile?
If this game show wants to see how smart you really are, they need to ask you how much calories in a regular onion–cheddar cheese bagel. Go ahead, ask you the price of your cell phone minutes any hour of the day. Ask you about the cost of a ticket for going thirty miles over the speed limit. Ask the round-trip fare to Cabo for spring break. Down to the penny, you can tell them the price of decent seats for the Panic at the Disco! reunion tour.
They should ask you the price of a Long Island Iced Tea. The price of Marcia Sanders’s abortion. Ask about your expensive herpes medication you have to take but don’t want your folks to know you need. Ask the price of your History of European Art textbook which cost three hundred bucks—fuck you very much.
Ask what that stamp of Hello Kitty set you back.
The sweatshirt granny bids some regular amount of money for her showcase. Just like always, the numbers of her bid appear in tiny lights, glowing on the front of her contestant desk where she stands.
Here, all the Zeta Delts are yelling. Your phone keeps ringing and ringing.
For your showcase, a supermodel rolls out five hundred pounds of raw beefsteak. The steaks fit inside a barbecue. The barbecue fits onboard a speedboat that fits inside a trailer for towing it that fits a massive fifth-wheel pickup truck that fits inside the garage of a brand-new house in Austin. Austin, like, in Texas.
Meantime, all the Zeta Delts all stand up. They get to their feet and step up on their audience seats cheering and
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