Scribbles and Horrors

Here is a picture I took the other day.

While enjoying my coffee and my donut there was directly before me–displayed specifically for someone in my position to view–an idealized version of the very experience I was currently having. An odd encounter!

I understand advertising: the point of the poster is to make people who aren’t having coffee and donuts want some. The donut shop commodifies the experience of having a donut, and they sell this experience in order to make profit for their owners. It does not matter to the shop whether the experience is enriching to me or my community; all it cares about is ensuring that as many people as possible will pay for it as often as possible.

But what was this image to me, the fool who had already succumbed to the desire, who was actively consuming the commodity being sold?

Maybe the point is to demonstrate to me the buyer that my experience and the advertised one is the same. The store is saying “See? We aren’t lying. You get what you see in our pictures. We are a trustworthy establishment” It’s not as though the donut shop was actively swindling me–the donut was good enough; the coffee was hot. As you can see, it was like the picture.

Maybe it’s simple contempt. The only images a donut shop bothers to produce are advertisements, and so that’s the only decor they have. Once someone has purchased a donut-having experience, the shop does not bother one iota about giving that experience anything more. There are chairs, tables, and a bathroom out of begrudging accommodation for human needs, but it is not selling a “sitting at a table” experience: it is selling a donut and coffee one. All its decorative aims are devoted to this end, and this end alone. Everything else is superfluous, and, as long as it’s not intolerable, it is allowed.

I wonder about other images around me which I embody as I encounter them: The little white “crossing person” whom I become when the light changes, and that pants-wearing figure at the public restroom (after all what better image to represent pissing and shitting than gendered clothing?)–these are instructional symbols, attempting to tell me what to do and who to be.

What is easier to create nowadays than an image? What comes more naturally in everyday 21st century life than media depiction? Everything must have a picture attached–and to ensure making pictures is even easier corporations have developed AI-slop to fill this need, this constant need to present images and commodify experiences, to make sure that we are caught in an impenetrable forest of pictures all of the god-damn time.

Importantly for my rhetorical aims, this blog post itself centers a picture which I made with the camera that is always in my pocket in case I need to make an image out of something I see in my everyday experience. My daily pocket loadout has me constantly poised to capture, repackage, and share the world around me.

I have been trying to be better about being bored, about sitting in one place and letting myself simply be. I guess I’d prefer the donut shop window have no pictures at all and let me sit there and look through the glass. No decor for me, thanks, I just want to spend my lunch break in a real place.

Of course all places are real places if you have experiences in them, even commodified ones, even imaginary ones. You can be bored anywhere if you’re thoughtful enough.