Gutsy Guava # 8

In a public forum, nothing is really real anymore.

Supposedly hospitals and airplane terminals page nonexistent people as a way to communicate with employees without inciting panic.

When you sit at the coffee shop on the corner, even if you can’t seem to recall ever really caring how you look you still change your posture to appear more…something.

In a personals ad, the terminology used can be read in at least a hundred different ways. The allies could have used substitution codes of this caliber to outdo the enigma cipher.

When you open a paper to the back section and thumb past all of the many ads for used trucks, yard sale announcements, and antique dealers to the personals section? Anymore you’re not reading English.

Athletic means small breasts.

Outgoing means either insecure, or an abusive pushover.

References to food are veiled limitations on possible date places.

All of this, a string of euphemisms so layered they would put a funeral director to shame.

All of this in the pursuit of love, or some undying bond people need to feel.

All of these feelings, brain chemistry reactions that make sure humans pass their genes on.

Spreading around the world more, and more.

An infinite cycle.

And all it does is create more personals ads, printed on cheap paper that cycles through again.

Every now and then, an ad surfaces that seems to get it, Some kitsch, ironic snippet that doesn’t bother to whore out the individual doing the advertising. A catchy phrase that subtly mocks the institution being used while at the same time, earnestly straining against the bounds of life.

Those ad’s don’t have a target market, or rather will never reach it.

Even reading them in a joking fashion can’t do much to cover up the fact that at it’s base, the self-deprecation in such an utterly self-absorbed exercise is unavoidable.

And so, the cycle goes on.