One too many perfect smiles. The smiling, laughing, coquettish and youthfully vigorous perfection of the advertising images slowly worked their way into his unconscious like a sociopathic ferret into warm and inviting undergarments. His mundane daily grind of cartons and boxes, bottles and advertising copy was an overwhelming repetition of perfection, utopian lifestyle and the promise of a blissful and unending personal consumer satisfaction. It began to gnaw away at his sense of perspective and whatever notional life-raft of reality he found himself clinging to in this world of consumable knick-knacks and low-fat, environmentally-friendly close-weave woollen knickers. It was all too much.

He began to feel as though he were becoming a character in a bad student film about the psychological pressures of working in a large corporate wonderland of bullshit and chewing gum. All of the perfect teeth in the smiling faces of those glamorous-looking girls on the front of those boxes of hair dye (and just why do they need perfect teeth to sell hair-colouring products anyway ?), all of the bright and happy families oozing vitality from the cereal packets, all of the loyal pets cheerfully (some might say - wistfully) gazing back from the pet food product labels - it was all too much.

He was beginning to become a character in a drama revolving around the endless (almost Sisyphean) task of stocking the crap that people need (and think they want) into supermarket shelves and fridges, freezers and display cabinets. Somewhere between a carton of low-carb beer and cheap-as-shit fizzy booze the images of beautiful and improbably symmetrical women began to flash from his unconscious into his conscious awareness. The desire for items and goods began to show itself in it’s naked form as a pure lusting, thrusting and gyrating animal urge to feed, copulate and breed. He began to feel that people were only really furthering their lusts through their purchasing power in these supermarket shelves and that even the displays of housewives and mothers playing happy families were all about people lusting after the things that they knew were never really real or fact in the first place. They were all (him included) looking for some panacea or soulful salve to soothe the emptiness they all knew lay below their desires and baser urges to consume, to engage with the only reality they knew - this packeted, polished and perfected image of perfection to which they were all lured like compass needles towards magnetic North and just like these needles they were always just slightly and ever off the mark of the true North of their needs. The desire was always and in some way by it’s very nature skewed away from what would truly fill the void within. Deep down they all knew it. Deep down he knew it too but he played the game like everyone else. Chasing a perfection he knew he never could attain. Images of beautiful women played upon the mirror of his unconscious mind and the thousand ripples and affectations were the “oh that would be handy” or ” I never knew they even made those” of the poor supermarket worker enthralled as much as any punter by the cornucopian plethora of products on display.

Underneath it all lay a desire. An unspoken (perhaps unspeakable) desire that could never be fulfilled. Everyone has it. We all play the game. We know we can’t fill the void within but we choose to spend a greater portion of our lives chasing it anyway and, somewhat intentionally, place our aim just slightly off the mark in this way. When we chase the perfection of the advertiser’s artificially enhanced life we know we can never attain these images. We know that falling for their allure will always leave us even emptier than when we first began desiring. We all know, deep down, that the perfect beauty and pseudo-copulatory sense of completeness we seek in the product and the media-projected consumer life is like an impossibly perfect digital beauty which in it’s all-too-perfect symmetry and customisable lustfulness detracts us from the true North of the real and perfect beauty which is precisely already that less than perfect self and other that we already all are. The blemishes, scars and asymmetries of our bodies, of our lives, are what make us perfect. He felt like a character in a bad student film because he knew all this and he couldn’t tell anyone, no one would listen. So he would imagine his virtual beauties as he stacked the shelves and disposed of the cardboard to the recycling units. He would impose his own desires upon the tedious oblivion of his workplace until he could finally imagine that there was something even remotely sensuous or desirable in his peasant-like role. He would by sheer power of will project a beauty upon the emptiness of his working life because he knew that was what people did to convince themselves there was any reason to be living such a life in the first place, that their (hire-purchase) fictions were taking them to the fulfilment of their desires and their dreams. Desires and dreams which were, of course, never really their own (any more than his digitally pre-fabricated dream-girls were really his own). He superimposed the emptiness of the impossibility of his fulfilment embodied as a nubile woman upon the sheer crappery of his job. His unconscious bled into his conscious life.

The desire to belong. The desire to be loved. The desire to leave something worthwhile in his wake when the small pebble of his life had finally sunk below the water’s surface and he no longer was. He knew that in the end there really were no such things as people or desires. Only the ripples they make as they skip across the water’s delicate surface and the interacting, intersecting patterns these ripples make in time.

One of my hobbies includes creating attractive digital women with a combination of software, patience and good taste. It is a hobby which keeps my mind off the unending mindlessness of my job. One of my other hobbies is complaining about my job. Here I have synthesised both hobbies with my love of writing.