Sitting here watching television this evening, I’ve had an epiphany about marketing. I’ve realized, to my greatest chagrin, that I am exceptionally susceptible to the modern marketing machine.

If you look at my life, it is filled with icons of what popular culture considers the “must have” accessories. The iBook I am using to post this very entry. The iPod that pumps my entire CD collection into my ears via my Bose noise-canceling headphones. The BMW 325it sport wagon parked serenely in my driveway waiting for me to test her German engineered abilities. The Ted Baker Suit hanging in the closet, next to the collection of designer named ties above the collection of expensive footwear. Even Stella, currently sleeping soundly on the corner of my bed, though she will eventually lay claim to the entire right hand side before too long, has not given me the level of enjoyment I envisioned.

Here’s the thing. Not one of those things has made me happier in my life. Not one of them has given me the level of joy I anticipated when I purchased them. My life did not automatically start to resemble the commercials. I do not dance down the street with my iPod as the shaded out figures do in their commercials. I do not sit in fancy cafes with super models and beautiful people drinking lattes while typing earnestly into my iBook. I still sit my fat ass at my desk everyday spending far too much time on the computer. My daily commute to my home office in the living room does not resemble the twisting back roads of Northern California, depicted in the automobile commercials. I don’t have happy, energetic people in my car with me laughing at how amazing life is as I sit in traffic with the windows rolled down trying not to choke on the pollution coming out of the SUV exhaust conveniently at the same height as my window.

So where did this infatuation with stuff begin? I think it started in grade school. With all honesty, I can blame the Merry-Go-Round chain store in the mall near my hometown. A little background…

googglie goo.. googglie goo… googglie goo…

I was the youngest, and as far as I’m aware, the only gay child in a family of seven. I’ve always hungered for attention and love. I grew up in a middle class home in a farming community where there was never enough money to go around. I was very aware of the fake wood paneled rec rooms that so many of my friends enjoyed. Our house was custom built in an area and time where custom homes were not the norm. From my vantage point, being just 6 years old when we built the house, we were rich. My Mother had the first imported sports car (a 1985 Mazda RX-7) in town and I was always so proud to drive around with her, enjoying the stares and quizzical looks. In my mind, we were the all that and a bag of potato(e) chips.

Typical of any gay boy growing up in the toxic environment of small town America, fighting the urge to kill myself just to be done with the pain of being different and hiding the truth about who I really was from everyone I came into contact with, I would lose myself in books and movies, on television and in magazines. I took the Cosmo girl quizzes in my sister’s magazines and imagined that the models I stared at in my mother’s J.C. Penny catalogue were the men I was taking this quiz about. I escaped into a world I created to protect myself. But escaping into it was never enough for me and more than once, I would beg my mother to take me to Merry-Go-Round so that I could get the hottest new look I saw on MTV or in a magazine. It was my intention to re-create in my own existence, the life I envisioned other people enjoyed.

googglie goo… googglie goo… googglie goo…

Twenty-five years have passed since I pestered my mother into buying me a pair of zipper pants and the matching jacket. The grey suit that unzipped to reveal the black insert was my pride and joy and has also become a symbol for me. A symbol of what trying too hard can do to you. It can cause you to do more than simply make bad fashion choices, it can cause you to make bad choices period.

So what does this have to do with marketing and what was my epiphany?

It’s really quite simple.

When the pizza hut commercial came on less than 20 minutes after I finished a delicious chicken curry tandori bowl I just threw together and I started to drool, wanting to order an extremely bad, greasy, uber-corporate created pizzaI knew I had a problem.

Allow me to make a plea to the marketers out there. please put a notice in your advertisements that they apply to everyone except a certain someone in Chicago with a destructive spending habit.

Not only am I a food racist, but now, I need to be avoid marketing as well.