Search

Ever bought something hoping it would make you a better human being? Here’s what a few Stay Free! readers had to say.

Readers Poll | Issue #18

At some point in the mid-1990s, I actually fell for one of those gym equipment infomercials (one of those groggy 4 a.m. purchases, but no alcohol was involved). I bought something called the Ab Monster. The people on TV, with their perfect form and washboard abs, looked great using the Ab Monster. When it first came in the mail, I thought most of its parts were missing. It was just a big rubber band with a pole on one end. You were supposed lie on your back, loop the rubber band around your neck, put your feet in the stirrups, then tuck your legs in and out and in and out. But every time you pressed out, it ripped the hairs out of your neck. There was no way this thing could be good for you. It was more like a whiplash simulator than gym equipment. There was an 800 number on the box to call with any questions. I called up and said, "I just bought the Ab Monster and I want to know if it goes in the trash or the recycling bin."

Gary Greenberg

Middle school sucked. By the end of eighth grade I had lost pretty much all the friends I had in sixth grade, and I spent most of my time holed up with my Apple II or daydreaming about being a BMX racer. I knew I was a geek but wasn’t proud of it. I thought the beginning of high school was my chance to bust out of my old personality, to show everyone how charming, smart, and popular I could be. So the week before freshman orientation I went shopping. Levi’s, Vans, Gordon & Smith. I was determined to be fashion forward, to show those fuckers just how cool I could be. At the local mall’s Gap–this was during the dark pre-khakis days, when it was just a lame holdover from the 1970s–I found THE SHIRT. This was it, my ticket to a fashionable reputation. It was two shirts in one, really; the outer layer was like a T-shirt in a deep, rich, cafe-au-lait tan; there was a deep open flap extending about halfway down the front of the shirt, which opened to reveal a bright red under-t-shirt. (At this point I should note that I don’t look good in red. Really not good.) There was a horizontal seam around the middle of the shirt, where the inside shirt met the outside one. There were little snap-buttons on the flap. I tucked it into my crisp, dark, unshrunken 501s.

Not only did no one at the orientation notice my coolness, no one–not even the budding fashion plates–were wearing anything remotely like that shirt. I sweated and I couldn’t speak and I wanted to cry. The social order did not change.

David E. Brown

Hope is a dead language. The summer after my freshman year in college, I decided to join an international community of political radicals by learning Esperanto, the artificial (Indo-European based) language of hope. I checked out a primer through my small-town public library’s interlibrary loan, made hundreds of flash cards, and, regrettably, spent over $30 on various publications–from a cookbook to a bilingual Esperanto/ Czechoslovakian sex manual. I never took the time to make any contacts in my new linguistic community and–six years later–am only able to say the following three phrases: "The astronaut photographs the moon with special instruments," "The blues is beautiful," and "Please ask your record store to stock this ESP disk." Real helpful, huh?

Brian Boling

The allure of high-tech communications equipment has held me in thrall for as long as I can remember. As a child, I fashioned ersatz cockpit headsets out of plastic finger bowls and wire hangers; I secretly spoke into my Texas Instruments digital wristwatch while playing in my backyard. But a chasm separated my imaginary com technology from the real stuff I could never afford. That is, until this year, when I resolved to join the legions of talking heads weaving through the crowded NYC streets, their hands poking and caressing those sleek, suppository-size telephones. I would be excluded from this invisible matrix no longer. I would never again miss an impromptu drink with friends. I would feel included, jacked in–important.

I marched down to Radio Shack, parted with a couple hundred dollars, and returned home with this tiny, lovingly contoured, chrome-colored fetish-object, more gorgeous and packed with buttons and lights than anything I could have dreamed of as a kid. After about an hour of tinkering, I felt sufficiently acquainted with my new phone to drop it in the pocket of my shorts and step out for a walk. Despite the fact that I had given the number to only a handful of people, none of whom had any good reason to call me that afternoon, I expected the phone to begin chirping away any minute. After about twenty blocks of silence, I impulsively removed the phone to make sure I hadn’t somehow strayed out of the service area, but the liquid-crystal symbols on the backlit screen said, Signal strong, No missed calls, No voice mail. In the ensuing weeks I became woefully familiar with my phone in its inert, standby mode. The thing would occasionally come to life on weekends during volleys of cell-to-cell calls that generally served only to complicate the evening’s plans. But during the week, especially in the hours after work and before bed, my pretty little phone seemed to do little more than remind me of how circumscribed and unspontaneous my life had become. The wireless life I had envisioned–an urbane one in which satisfying packets of meaning and attention would be beamed to me daily, wherever I happened to be–failed to materialize.

Nevertheless, I am still carrying my phone around with me pretty much wherever I go. Every once in a while I will pull it out and flip it open just to watch the screen and buttons light up so that I can feel that childlike thrill stir anew. But the sensation is ever more fleeting; within seconds my attention returns to my surroundings, and I am scanning the streetscape and storefronts for fresh stimulus–the next new device that will connect me once and for all to the magical, borderless world of the future that everyone keeps talking about.

David McAninch