The room is lit with candles; shadows dance through draped silk and give depth to the polished figures carved deep into the oak of the four poster bed. The sensual musk of anticipatory sweat rises from my prone figure; my heartbeat fills me with the ocean-sound of pulsating blood. The sugar-rush of lust knots my body as I hear the footsteps reaching the door.
With silent motion, the door opens... for a second the candles flicker; the light revealing a staccato image of the Latin beauty before me; her breathing slow and deep; her eyes focussed with fire and intent. Monica Bellucci. Monica Bellucci... her name washes over me and pricks my skin with needle-tips as the animal within pulls taut against the shackles of self-control. Her curves are gripped by my imagination, her dress lifted by my minds-eye to reveal pure skin teasing above stocking-tops. An orchestra of prescience builds to crescendo as, small step by small step... she moves to me... the floor now a catwalk of lucid female flesh.
Her breath on my neck. Warm and deep. Her hair teasing the honey-soaked sensitivity of my bare chest. I turn my head to the glass of the window; the framed reflection narrating the scene... I am voyeur to my own fate; the sight of her curved figure kneeling above me stirs my masculinity as a waking beast... I focus... my eyes pushing through the reflection to the world outside...
My heart almost stops as my pupils dilate to the vision in the street below.
Is that a fucking Nissan GTR!? The new model with improved torque-curve? Sorry about this love... give me thirty minutes, finish yourself off and I’ll bring you up a sandwich when I get back. Egg & cress? Smashing. A fucking Nissan GTR!..
Think I’m joking? I’ve paused on more than one occasion when I’ve been in the throes of love to savour the sound of a car or motorbike going past with the throttle open. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but if some sadistic bastard were to offer me one night with Monica Bellucci or one night with a Nissan GTR, I’d be smoking the tyres of Nippon engineering before the dark temptress had the time to remove her unfeasibly tiny undercrackers.
Which leaves me with a quandary. Because at the root of my love for fast cars sits a dark and depressing reality that chews at my every fibre.
Materialism.
Now, I could sit here arguing that my love of fast cars stems from the instinctive masculine desire to hone my skills of spatial awareness and engineering brilliance, but that would be like saying that I appreciate porn-harlot Jenna Jameson because she has good child-baring hips.
And she may well do.
But in reality, both the GTR and Ms Jameson would be a cheap thrill to satisfy the ego. Neither would provide me with a lasting experience with depth or meaning. And come to think of it, they wouldn’t be cheap either.
If you want to get contrived about it, you could argue that sauntering around in the car, or hanging-out-the-back of the blonde filth-meister would improve my social standing in a Machiavellian context, but this only bolsters the fact that this would make me a self-serving arsehole, regardless of the purportedly positive weight that Machiavellianism holds in certain areas of current social philosophy (mainly ones involving money). It wouldn’t improve my quality of life as a nuts-and-bolts modern human-being. And if you think of the amount of time, energy and materials that go into making that car or the deep sense of a wasted-life that will hit Ms Jameson when her fanny finally dries-up, both scenarios actually end up doing far more damage than any ego-hit for me could possibly justify.
And right there – badly illustrated with my finger-daubed blurb – is the problem with a materialistic society: Unjustifiable acquisition and the patently obvious harm it causes.
Basically, most of our materialistic urge comes from a need to satisfy the ego. The more attractive an item is, the more we get to pseudo-wank ourselves into a self-loving frenzy, or flex in the mirror when we finally purchase it; which was probably handy back in the days when basic acquisition meant that we could successfully feed our family, or keep ourselves safe, or obtain a way of reducing the risk of dying prematurely. Our ego gave us a big-fat dopamine reward to tell us that we were doing the right thing. We were genuinely improving our lot and our biology had evolved to tell us so.
So, what happens when these tools for a better life become incredibly inefficient, mass-manufactured goods that do little for us outside of the provision of an ego-hit? Well, Darwin gets another gold-star as he proves that the unfit die on their arse.
Think about it – there is little less economic than the western model of economics. We build stuff to break. It is an intrinsic part of capitalism; the need to make people buy more and more shit. The need for items to have a clearly finite usefulness. Sure, we have the ability to make items that would easily last a lifetime, but no business would make money if they sold an item that would never need replacing. The ubiquitous business model is to design obsolescence into goods, so that you keep going back and buying more. And on top of this, we hold back on selling the most up-to-date technologies, so that we can either design inferior products which are then pushed at lower price points (usually in the name of consumer choice), or so that businesses can future-proof themselves in the knowledge that they will have something saleable in 10 years time – which, by that time will have been superseded by newer technologies, and so the loop goes on.
And if you think about how the majority of items are made, it’s usually a single component within a complex product that goes kaput. Yet we throw the whole bloody thing away if it’s not cost-effective to fix.
The upshot is that we are consuming thousands of times more resources than we can possibly sustain. We are both literally and figuratively murdering the human race by sitting at the buffet and snorting up all the vol-au-vents whilst our kids look at us with a starved look in their eyes - and the caterers have buggered off, never to return.
EVERY life system on the planet is on the decline. This is a scientific fact. Every peer-journal over the last few decades has confirmed this, and also the fact that this is a human-led problem - a by-product of our greed and stupidity.
So, I have made a pledge to myself that every time I walk past a Nissan garage and get the idea that I must start the pointless addiction-led route towards the 60 grand I’d need to buy a GTR, I imagine that with every pound I save, a starving kid finally wastes away.
Sad thoughts maybe... but it also means that I run the chance of actually reaching orgasm on the day that Monica Belluci finally realises how sexy I am.
Dee.
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