Information Junkies

Firstly, according to most doctors and social workers, not to mention some research I’ve done myself, one of the first and major signs of being an addict is that the user doesn’t even realise that they’re addicted. They may not even know what it is that they’re addicted to.

It’s true…for eight years the skin on my hands and face was addicted to moisturiser. I started off with a dry patch on my nose, from smoking or something, for which I was taking 10 to 12 millilitres of alcohol-free moisturiser a day. As we all know from popular media reports, this can quickly become a slippery slope…Before I knew it I had moved on to 20 millilitres of glycerine-enriched Neutrogena. And that was just to satisfy the fingers that I was applying the shit with…I tried to wean myself off it, but eventually I couldn’t even leave the house in the mornings without my fix. It was embarrassing at first, but then I found out there’s more of us sufferers out there. We really should do something about it, like form a support group, Moisturisers Anonymous, or take to the streets and demand our politicians fight a global war against these corporate cosmetics pushers.

Modern medicine is something else, isn’t it? Like, as soon as we discover why it is we sweat and our hormones and our glands produce all this liquidy stuff (steady now), I mean, in our hair, and our skin and everything – we think, nah for god’s sake, we could have done this better. Who needs glands when you’ve got Neutrogena? Who needs pheromones, and natural oils -which may stink now, but they’re FREE– when you can have us going back year after year, for bottle after bottle of glycerine-enriched-denatured-alcoholic-cosmetic-fruit-drinks. They put formaldehyde in shampoo, for god’s sake – that’s taking the piss. If you didn’t think your hair was dead already…

The human race is unique among animals; not because the most of our glandularity is located outside of our bodies; not because of our intelligence, either (I say dolphins are smarter - for the sole reason that they live in the water instead of having it rain on them); not because we utilise technology, either(some monkeys use hammers to crack their nuts, you know…and, some birds drop snails on rocks to break their shells, too…I’ve seen evidence); no, we’re unique because we’re addicted to information.

Whether it’s good news, bad news, idle gossip, magazines, TV all day, computers everywhere, laptops, handhelds, 0898-petty-advertising, intravenous-direct-lines, for god’s sake – we’re all, insatiably, hooked - on information! Now, as every good junkie knows, where we get our supply from might dictate how good a hit we’re gonna get from our fix. Where do you get yours?

Somebody once told me that when Americans come to Europe, they don’t dislike the food, they don’t even hate the people that much – they just miss the billboard advertising on the roadsides back home. They don’t like the BBC, not because they’re a state run government mouthpiece, no, but because they can’t concentrate on any show that’s not interrupted by almost time-lapse virtual shopping at least once every five minutes.

Having done the shopping, the marketing come down leaves us temporarily satisfied, but wondering if we really had a good time or not - or whether it was all just a ploy for the product pushers to get at our money. Deep down, we all know that there are better drugs out there than corporate marketing.