The upside of watching streaming services: fewer commercials. I don't miss them. I do not watch broadcast news, so I don't see the ads for drugs like Rungforu ("Ask your doctor if Rungforu is right for you. Side effects may include dissolving, sudden lack of skin, desire to play the oboe.")
The football commercials fall into a few tidy genres: bro-moments centered around consumption of protein and carbohydrates. Here is a grain-based liquid that intoxicates incrementally; here is a round bread-based foodstuff in which cheese has been ingeniously injected into its perimeter.
Then there are the car ads. Usually it's a couple enjoying an emotional car-based life experience. But last week I saw the squeegee ad, and it makes me fear for the moral quality of the nation.
We see a young guy at a gas station, wiping his windshield with the wand. You know what I mean: the sponge-on-a-stick you find leaning with weary defeat in the corner of a bucket of blue poison. The manager of the gas station comes around the corner, smiling.
"Hey, there," he says. "You gettin' some gas?"
"Ah, just using your squeegee," the driver says. He is not getting any gas because he has a vehicle that uses electricity.
The manager, still smiling but cautious because he doesn't know if this violation of the social contract means the guy is also a violent sociopath, says, "Well, if you squeegee, it kinda comes with the gas."
The volt-dolt is surprised: "Squeegee isn't free?" Oh, yes, of course it's free, we get the fluid from a spring out back. But the manager, attempting to instruct the arrogant little tapeworm on the interlocking assumptions that make up human society, says, "It's free ... with gas."
