Return to Left Curve no. 20 Table of Contents
Ornament by Michael Filas Ornament the top of gasoline pumps with oil encrusted carcasses of seagulls sea otters mackerel terns dolphins jellyfish sea lions rock cod cormorant pelicans. Come clean for selling your trade as environmentally conscious. Make up for misleading commercials where raccoons and deer praise your name. Admit you spend next to nothing on environmental improvement. Buy a charity. Be honest about the tax write off and the public relations boondoggle. Paint your company logo on plastic frisbees and give them away at Earth Day celebrations. Persist in using single hull tankers. Spill oil freely. Keep a straight face. Let refineries explode before you repair them. Lock your doors. Drive your engine clean. Ornament your memory by filming important moments. Mediate real-time experience with a handicam. Save the video tapes and play them for pleasure. Vids instead of memory. Mark time with the tapes. Play them and comment about your physical deterioration. Say, "God, look how skinny I was!" Get disgusted. Buy a gym membership. Soloflex sweat count calories. Marvel at the technology of gym equipment. Ride calorie counting stairsteppers and pulse taking treadmills. Push hydraulic hissing pectoral presses. Obsess over fitness. Buy muscle builder pills fat burner powders. Drink Diet Pepsi wear Nike. Eat fat free. Pose in your daily life like the creatures on the covers of muscle magazines. Tape video of yourself in hardbody order. Save the vids. Get fat again. Ornament the corporate lobby with shopping carts homeless vagrants cardboard tents. Line the cubicle corridor with a multicultural cross section of rotting bums. Provide folding chairs. Make them piss in the corner. Order quiet and have the guard club a few. Serve Thunderbird wine and dumpster findings in silverplate china of executive dining rooms. Herd the homeless into twenty-floor elevators. Remind them to mutter incoherently. Consider them a different species that's crazy and wicked and doesn't know how to behave in corporate lobbies. Ornament your suburban bedrooms with babies. Compare your child's weight and length to the statistics. Say, "Jimmy's a big boy, 92nd percentile." When Jimmy learns to crawl, enter him into the livestock contest at the county fair. Place him in the swine ring and chase him around slapping with a pig slapper. Allow the judges to feel your baby's thighs and neck. Win the blue ribbon. Ornament your avarice with misleading advertising. Cut down as many trees as you can sell. Where you can make money at it, plant and raise trees to cut down later. Film yourself planting but never cutting. Call yourself a tree planting company. Export millions of dollars and square-miles of natural resources and become richer. Say you're doing it to save logging jobs. Smoke a cigar. Institute a pay reduction for loggers. Call Senator Packwood collect. Ornament a political, sports, celebrity career with scandal. Make it sassy. Stand-out from your peers. Insert your name into the news and tabloids. Write a book. Preoccupy yourself with your place in history. Orchestrate events carefully. Time precisely the release of your book or mini-series docudrama. Stand tall for your inequities. Embrace the religious right. Run for Senator. When you die, pray for public mourning. Hope they'll hang the flag at half mast for even longer than it bowed for Nixon's passing. Ornament your language with minutia and hi-tech jargon. Learn meteorology. Pay attention to the sidebars sports scores weather map factoid death tolls. Talk about low pressure systems with peaked interest. Frequently reference opinion polls and research. Say the bad connection is just your cell phone acting up. Cite calorie counts when you eat among others. Say you can't wait till everyone is fiberoptic. Ornament the market with fat free stickers. Place them on everything fatless. Like grapefruit bottled water canned peaches shampoo toothpaste disposable diapers. Don't stop with merchandise. Put fat free stickers on the shelves and bathroom doors, on the Assistant Manager and shopping carts. Ornament bar music with your own voice. Use a kerokae machine. Loosen up. Have fun. Enjoy hearing your voice perfectly superimposed onto radioesque sounds. Celebrate the technology. Substitute this for personal conversation with your friends. Pick a few numbers from the limited kerokae playlist, harmless classics, make these your own signature songs. Learn some minimal impersonations of the singer who made your kerokae songs famous. Say "thang-yoo" like Elvis. Pretend to be this celebrity more and more when you socialize. Replace yourself completely with trite cliches and gestures. Do this with a microphone for large crowds of strangers. Ornament disaster footage with a flashy production logo and a theme song. Run the logo and theme song before and after each loop or soundbite. Make it so a guy/gal in the kitchen spreading mayonnaise on a piece of bread can hear by the theme music if it's the OJ trial, a Tokyo subway gassing, or the Oklahoma City Bombing. Add credits similar to rock videos, like trailers. Show the loops every half hour. Don't call it rotation like MTV does, call it Headline News. But make it just as sexy as MTV. Lots of disaster victims, library footage of war and weapons. Flash an Arab face and mention terrorism. Interview a disproportionate number of Protestant clergy. Subtly, or not so subtly, insert your Christian Coalition, Atlanta Hawks tomahawk chop opinion into the factoids. Ornament your misery with amputation. Remove a finger. Do it because you want to express your pain, frustration, anger. Do it to manifest the internal bleeding of your nervous system. Do it to flagrantly posit the body as the sole domain of your authority. Parade your ability to abuse authority with the best of 'em. Amputate another finger. When the bleeding scabs, approach Esprit Gap Bugle Boy about modeling clothes. Pose like the tattooed pierced models they already use in their commercials. Promise them that amputation is already big and getting bigger all the time. Let them touch your stubs. Negotiate a high dollar contract. Ornament your corrupt corporate hypocrisy with jargon and procedure. Euphemize a layoff. Call it rightsizing. Mystify the greediest policies by calling them corporate decisions. Hide the decision makers behind a veil of annonymous authority. Encourage an environment where workers keep tabs on each other in vicious competition to see who works the most hours. Reward backstabbing, long hours, weekend work. Call it team spirit, work ethic. Vomit slogans like 'In Search of Excellence'. Get caught for violating moral and legal codes with corporate decisions. Protect the manicured executives. Mandate an ethics program to appease the authorities. Present it as the remedy for corrupt directors and managers who dump toxic waste near people's homes, who lie in the records, who abuse their access. But administer instead a program which preaches to the working stiffs about the evils of stealing pencils, making personal calls on company time with company phones, using Email for private messages, making personal copies on the office xerox. Make the underlings sign forms saying they were warned. Tell the authorities you have signatures to prove you've instituted an ethics program. Ornament your womb with a live fetus. Take the baby challenge. Fashion a $98,000 in- vitro genetic reproduction. Stick yourself in the leg with a fertility drug to balance another fertility drug. Do it every day. Jack off into a cup and give it to a lab assistant. Wash the semen away from the sperm and insert them into eggs. Construct twenty zygotes. Freeze the zygotes you don't use. Confuse the frozen zygotes with frozen orange juice concentrate. Mix a breakfast beverage from frozen zygotes. Compare frozen orange juice futures with frozen embryo futures. Buy family values. Ornament the dullest and least important work with acronyms. Call a timecard an Employee Time Record, better yet an ETR. Talk about the ETR with urgency. Audit the ETR administrator. Make everything mundane and thankless more fashionable and important by virtue of the sexy names and elaborate procedures. Do this ASAP. Ornament your demonstration with a dead fetus. Steal it. Wave it around and get on the news. Protest the use of dead fetuses for research. Kill a doctor. Call yourself the moral majority. Remain pious. Buy politicians with campaign pay. Throw the dead fetus at sixteen-year-old girls with unwanted pregnancies. Change gears. Protest the repeal on the ban on gays in the military. Call yourself a right-to-life-er but don't discuss what kind of life. Ornament corporate lobbies and boardrooms with decorative art. Spend enormous sums for abstract and figurative investments. Place these decorations in your company buildings and slap your logo on merchandise in the museum stores, on the foreheads of the docents, discretely embossed on the lower left corner of the displayed art works. Tell your bought congressmen that you demand a tax cut and then insist they fund it by shutting down the NEA. Threaten to cut campaign pay. Claim corporations are already paying for the arts. Cite your own collection publicly displayed in the boardroom on the thirty second floor of your Providence, Rhode Island headquarters. Say shut up already about literature. Shout accusations of smut and pornography. Watch the congressmen follow orders. Make them dress the money decision as a moral one. Say liberal elitism often. Use the budget slash to buy cold-blooded votes from the radical right. Marvel at your power. Ornament your telephone with voicemail. Record a friendly greeting. Listen to your own greeting whenever you feel like making a call. Get in the habit of doing this, calling your recorded self. Not narcissistically, but casually like calling a pal. Write the phone company a letter telling them you're doing this calling yourself routine. Tell them you have generic all-American looks and that you're willing to talk about your personal life and phone usage patterns in public. Let them pay you to make a TV commercial promoting this call yourself activity. Let them ask you if you'd fax and Email yourself if they were to give you your own fax machine, computer, and Email account? Say sure you would. Put this in the commercial too. End the commercial with a statement that the phone company does it's deeds because it's people helping people. Say this as if they'd do it for free. Become the guy that "just says hi" to himself in multimedia. Covet your schtick and become a fixture in advertising. Get your own talk show. Ornament your career with scandal. Ornament your consumption with mail-order clubs. Join a wine of the month club, book club, disk of the month club, coffee club, Faberge egg club, classical music club, video club, cheese club, citrus of the decade fruit club. When you get your packages in the mail, act like you don't know what's inside. Is it grapefruit or oranges? Is it a bomb? Maybe it's those delicious tangelos? Someone get me a knife. Ornament your life with a sassy death. Have a killing spree and ride over a cliff in a convertible with a girlfriend in 50's kitsch garments. Become a famous rock superstar and blow your head off. Be consumed in death even more than you were in life. Do some shopping then light yourself on fire in the mall food court. Better yet, rent Faces of Death at your local video store and watch vid people and vid mammals wince and suffer as death takes place. Pay $3 for this. Eat popcorn while you watch. Curse the violence and opt for other programming - soundbites of war in Croatia, Bosnia, Mexico, Oklahoma, Tokyo, anywhere else but where you are. Better yet, kill yourself but don't die. Near die and come back to work the white light circuit.