A Sucker's World

Even though I'm a prisoner on Mars I consider myself to be lucky. Despite the fact that Warden Liz and her Reptilian pals chase me all day long and take pot shots at me with their "discombobulators" and even though I have to graze for green goo and red toadstools or duke it out with other bums for chewing gum and sour balls, at least I'm not being tricked anymore by Madison Avenue and corporate liars and cheats. Earth is a sucker's world. And don't pretend you don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Every time you Earthlings buy a 12-pak of toilet paper to save money you think you're getting it cheaper than if you bought the 4-pak or the single rolls. Look again. Do the math. Yep, it's buyer beware, even with shit paper. Being a buyer-beware seller doesn't come any dirtier than tricking people into paying more money to take a crap than they should have to. And nothing tops being a buyer-beware sucker than paying more for 12 rolls in one, big, heat-shrink package than you would if you used both your hands to pull down a 4 -pak three times or twelve single rolls two-at-a-time. Sucker.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The world convinces you that if you don't buy brand name products you're not giving your family the very best. If you don't pay three times as much for quilted TP and you buy the bargain brand you might as well stock the linen closet with outdated phone books (no Sears catalogs anymore) or a basket of leaves, you're such a bad mom. So you play the sucker and get the shit paper that's as soft as a baby's bottom for all your bottoms and then you turn around and buy the store brand of peanut butter to make up for it. Sucker.

Sucker men are all over planet Earth, especially in flyover USA. No male between New York and LA would be caught dead wearing jeans that aren't seen and sold on TV. For flyover dads, wearing anything else means you're a terrible provider for your family, so pathetic that you even have to buy your own jeans at the dollar store. And that would dupe you into feeling like a day-old dog turd instead of a really smart shopper because you have no clue that a lot of dollar-store clothing is made just as good as any brand name. You think you get what you pay for and the truth is that you're paying for the name. Sucker fool.

And teenage suckers are the biggest suckers of all. If teenage boys and girls don't look, dress and act exactly like every other teenage boy and girl they think the world has rooked them big time. (Look up the word "rook" yourself. This isn't a damn English lesson). The last generation in America to value individuality was the Baby Boomer generation and they were hated so much for wanting to be individual and unique that the males were shipped off to Vietnam before they could breed. They were easy to spot. For all their individuality, most college-age Baby Boomer guys looked the same in the late 1960s. Blue jeans, blue work shirt, Army surplus field jacket and sneaks. All the government needed to do was drop a big net on them and hoist it up.

But that was yesterday and today is today. Still, nothing's really changed. Anytime anybody in the world sees anybody else with something that they don't have, getting it becomes the number one reason for being alive. That's when you're such a sucker that you even sucker yourself.

Why do I still bother? All this ranting and raving will only get me more hate email from Earth. Which probably makes me the biggest sucker of all.