Full of Promises

The subway is so full of promises. So bossy. You, hey, you. Don't let impotence ruin your sex life. Get a career--in business, in welding. Meet someone your friends haven't dated. Go on a vacation to a lonely, warm beach, or eat some barbecued chicken. There are endless possibilities, explicit or implicit. Be sexy like these people. Be thinner. Be happier. Get health insurance. Stop smoking.

We all want to be better people. We all want more. To have more and to be more. There's something so desperate and sad about these ads. We will never have a career in business or one in welding. We'll keep smoking. We'll not use our vacation days, continue to allow impotence to ruin our sex lives, continue to live with foot pain. We will be fat and hungry in in our ruts. The promises linger but that is all they can be. These things are not given to us. They, most of the time, cannot even be bought. Because in them, what we really seek is happiness, and happiness cannot be reliably commodified. Hope, however, can. And that is what these ads really try to sell us: hope. And we'll buy that. Hope we'll gladly purchase, because without it, forever looms in the distance like a train tunnel. A train tunnel with nothing in it. And what's scarier--the bright, blind headlights of an oncoming train, or the absence of one, the abyss?

all material copyright laura podolnick, 2005-2006.