Boxers or Briefs?

I often wallow in self-deprecating cesspools of depression for the simple fact that I have found no lucrative and/or critically appreciative market for what passes in me as creativity or talent. The fact that I'm inordinately lazy adds to my general sense of despondence. Usually it's a quirky book of beauty and humour which sends me into a tailspin - Wilton Barnhardt's Gospel put me in a blue funk for weeks. Give up, C in R, I told myself - with a book like this in existence, what was the point in writing? - it's been done - he wrote my book. Based on my academic background and own predeliction for squirrelling away bits of recondite arcana, I should have written the Da Vinci Code - but I didn't, did I? Why? - good question. So good in fact, that I'll still be asking myself that very question as their screwing the bolts into my coffin lid.

But what really sends me over the Precipice of Doubt & Self-Loathing are those whose cunning little brains concoct something so absurdly innane that success is virtually guaranteed. Case in point: underthings for your Mp3 player. I suppose that sexualizing our children wasn't enough - now we are forced to consider the cleavages & crotches of our home electronics. So, for a scant $23.99 U.S., you can buy a limited (one can only hope) edition corset for your inanimate piece of metal - or for an additional $8, you can pick up an Ed Norton-like undershirt. Now you can ask: does your Mp3 wear boxers or briefs - but surely a gentleman - even a blue metallic one - never tells.

Now why didn't I think of that? Fuck writing a bestselling novel - I could have stayed at home one weekend and stitched up a couple of Y-fronts and made my billion. But I didn't. Why? - because I'm not in the game, I don't have the edge. If you need further proof of the innovative genius which I clearly do not possess, take a shufti at the trailblazing design for the ghost costume from the 2005 Hallowe'en line, which retails for a mindboggling $39.99 (okay, it does come with a gravestone which "may vary from the photo"). Wow a sheet - that's thinking outside the box. Mock though I may, these couturiers of crap are evidence that if god exists, he is either a sadist, a trickster or a moron. I am a Salieri ("I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint") to their Mozart.

As it is, I feel like a complete turd because I haven't sprung for a jaunty French beret or a sexed-up merry widow for my Mp3 player; they deliver overseas after all.

I'm off to kill myself with something blunt.