Stickers

She said she’d got it on “nine twelve” and that it was “one of them fee nickses rising from the ashes” and it got me thinking.

Humans have a basic need to stick things on other things. We stick buildings on property, we stick property on soil. We stick meanings on words. We stick fake stuff on our heads when the real stuff falls out. We do this at a rate which far exceeds anything resembling the instinctual marking of one’s territory and in this respect we are alone in the animal kingdom. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that this lone quality is what separates man from beast, never mind our alleged free will; chimpanzees do not plaster their SUVs and Jettas with logos and dolphins do not get tattoos. Certain livestock do, but that’s no choice of their own — they’re just breathing property, m(e)re things for people to stick other things to.

Cattle are not individuals, but make for good eating, footwear and saddlery. Their lives are valuable, but not in the same way as ours. We are beautiful and unique miniature Gods so, unlike cattle, we need to stick things onto other things to demonstrate our divinely sanctioned individuality. What better way to do this than by going to a place of business, buying a glossy piece of adhesive-backed media, removing the waxy backing and then smacking it onto the back of one’s already unique automobile? Well, there’s always the little blue dolphin ankle tattoo, tribal bicep markings or some tasteful characters from a foreign language with which you have no personal investment.

The ubiquitous lower-back tramp stamp is the corporeal equivalent of a “No Fear” sticker on a jeep; tattoos, while still an artform in conceptual terms, are about as edgy as SUV-driving, middle-class suburbanites embracing dog park Buddhism.

But, yeah.

There is no such thing as individuality, dead since the first time someone uttered either “just be yourself” or wrote “don’t change” in a yearbook. Every possible combination of clothing, accessories, haircut and, yes, stickers has been fed through the cultural garbage disposal of demographic marketing; somebody somewhere is all ready to sell heaps of lowest-bidder ephemera to someone who looks just like you, regardless of how many times you might change your mind in the process — they are always at least 1.97 steps ahead of you.

So just cut to the chase and wear it all on your sleeve. Just go with it. Wear it permanently. Embrace your alotted slot in life. After all, life’s a mall and the hours are getting longer every day.

Get a few generic band pins while you’re at it. Get a life, even.

Just leave the stickers alone for awhile. Support our troops, support a cure, support the ballsack. Knock yourself out, just leave the stickers at home.

Whatever happened to the simple Calvin pissin’ sticker? That, my friends, was a product — entirely bootlegged to satiate the simple buying power of a public that made the F-150 the staple vehicle of the Ford family of fine cars. Where have ye gone? No Fear? No, scared stiff. Petrified.

9/11 Man. Niine Eeeleven. That’s what did it. Pushed the freedom down, man.

Osama Bin Laden killed the almighty pissin sticker and I don’t expect him to apologize any time soon. Still, hope lives on in the eyes of eagles and other such shit as now pollutes the prime rear-window real estate once occupied by that mischievous sprite Calvin and his impish stream of piss. Occupied no more.

Pretty vacant.

Where was I on 9/11? Being a good human and looking at internet pornography and thinking up new and better ways of sticking things to other things.