Words and Thoughts: Life, Death, and Cardboard Tubes
Life, Death, and Cardboard Tubes
Hello again, alleged readers! I was recently watching one of the TVs in the Walmart, like I do on Tuesdays, and a commercial came on. Many commercials came on while I was there obviously, but there was one commercial that stood out, and that’s the one I was referring to back there when I said, “a commercial came on”. I will now tell you about that specific commercial.
A gaggle of toddler-aged angels were peddling toilet paper of the “Angel Soft” brand. As this group of angel-children sat around a corporate boardroom table, they giddily argued whether their toilet paper was “soft” or “strong”. This argument, almost completely lacking evidence to back up either claim, resulted in those assembled deciding that the feces-paper-on-a-roll is both soft and strong. Then the ad ends. What’s next for the children though? Like, what is their next meeting about? And this got me thinking about the broader environment laid out here in the 30 seconds of world-building the fine folks at the marketing agency employed by Angel Soft’s parent company, Georgia-Pacific LLC, had accomplished:
We have a corporate conference room populated with happy little children… who have become angels. We’ll leave the specifics of that process out of this particular narrative. And these children now work a 9 to 5 at a company that makes products that mostly clean food… that is no longer food. We’ll leave the specifics of that process out of this particular narrative. And they’re thrilled to death about it (no pun intended; we’ll leave puns out of this particular narrative). The whole scene – the angels, the colors, the tone, the everything – (you should be aware that I don’t know how to use dashes properly) is cheery, bright, and altogether heavenly. Yet our cast of unfortunate youth is seemingly doomed to a hellish life of corporate drudgery where meeting agenda topics consist of determining adjectives applicable to toilet paper.
This paradoxical Hell in Heaven is as horrifying as it is dystopian. Do the children know? If they don’t know, is their blissful ignorance the most terrifying kit of this whole caboodle. If they do know, then what unseen, unknown, and off-screen entity is forcing them beholden to their gleeful veneers, and what horror lies just below the veil, and just outside of the conference room door?
Steve Buscemi famously asked, in Bob Rodriguez’s epic Spy Kids 2, “Do you think God stays in Heaven because He too lives in fear of what He’s created?” Perhaps ol’ Mr. Buscemi there had it wrong. Maybe the line between Heaven and Hell is blurry, and growing ever fainter. God doesn’t stay in Heaven because he lives in fear of his creation, Steve. Rather fear is the creation, and we, like God, live the heavenly thrill and hellish dread many times over every day right here on the blurry line that is our own reality. Our triumphs and our failures, our hopes and our anxieties, our lives and our deaths locked in an inevitable and inescapable balance that is both Heaven and Hell in every moment of each of our days. God’s not hiding in Heaven, and those kids aren’t stuck in Hell. They’re all just out here roller skating around on the same spherical yin-yang that we are. It’s as frightening, or as joyful, as you choose to let it be.
And see, crap like all of that (no pun intended), is the reason the Knudsenens are a Charmin household.
