You know what I find fascinating?

Marketing.

I went to buy toothpaste the other day.

Toothpaste.

Toothpaste, people.

“A bold BLAST of cinnamon!”

“Revolutionary Whitening!”

I guess the fight against plaque is all we have left since we live in a fully functioning democracy free of monarchical tyranny.

Brushing your teeth?

No, my friend, you are combating plaque, annihilating tooth decay, struggling for whiteness. (Heh.)

Then, there’s antiperspirants with scents called “Phoenix,” “Dark Temptation,” and “Essence.”

Did I miss something?

You aren’t just a guy putting on some deodorant after the gym! Oh, no, you are Odysseus himself swerving through the wine red sea being lured by water nymphs… or whatever it was that lured him… into mysterious adventures and dangers.  Are the men buying these scents running off to steal a golden fleece or slay a hydra?

And people buy this stuff. They eat it up. Or they brush their teeth with it, anyway.

Simply fascinating.

I’m thinking it’s because most people lack any real adventure in their lives.  We go through life just sort of… surviving.

Thousands of years of human civilization, technology, progress, blah blah blah and we’re still just caught up in getting the food, cooking the food, having kids, getting the food for the kids, cooking the food for the kids…and, that’s fine, but it’s not really “extreme” or “cinnamon blast,” if you get my drift.

Toothpaste and deodorants speaking to the wildness within us, the need for more… the heroes who twitch for struggle, for meaning… we’re buying things with names like “Extreme” or “Dark Temptation” attached to them only proving that a bunch of suits in some office building have successfully deluded us into thinking that there’s adventure in the mundane.

It’s toothpaste, people.

Toothpaste.

You know there’s a history test that individuals applying for naturalization have to take, right?