My mind is for sale, but not my time. My time is finite. Unfortunately nobody is buying. Television made me a cowboy. Got the horse, got the gun, got the hat. Even got a girl and a place to bed down. Except robbers and men who chase them, never much learned how to get money. Seemed like the saddlebags mysteriously refilled themselves just enough. Life is not television. See, right there, some radical thinking. Life is not television.
The old man watched too much television. Always checking Faux News to see if anything moderately credible being promoted. Change right back. New cable company gave him RFD-TV, without him even asking. He recorded everything, simply could not abide commercial advertisements. He had worked in advertising, where he’d sold his mind and a little bit of his soul.
Pumping IPOs. Writing lines like ‘this pretend housewife with the large chest and bright hair waving her arm like a magician put this entire unit together with no tools in just minutes.’ This after a crew of four engineers in plaid shirts took four hours and a fistfight to get the closet organizer jerry-rigged enough not to fall apart on camera.
There were expense accounts and client lunches and dude ranches and pretend housewives with the large chests and bright hair. There were big binders of them. Nice teeth. Trying to keep his house really.
My mind is for sale but not my soul. Advertising was a slip. Needed to eat. The old man slipped a lot. He used to be a big eater. So was his horse.