Current Dateline:  Threadgill’s Austin, Tx Branch Office

“What are the ideas that define you?  What are the ideas that destroy you?” 

The father of the freshman moving into a dorm down on the University of Texas campus let slip that he’d rented a luxury SUV for the day so that his daughter would make the right impression.   Who’s that crazy?  I’m thinking.  Then I remember the steam box near death experience.

A movie came out recently titled “The Joneses” about a fake family that moves into an upper class neighborhood. The “family” is composed of actors hired by corporations to increase sales of high-end products.  To accomplish this, the family wears certain outrageously expensive watches, drives super cars, and has the latest clothes, furniture, and electronics.  The Pretend Husband and Pretend Wife display their perfect marriage and their perfect children by throwing elaborate parties and making entrances at the exclusive country club. The idea is that neighbors will rush to their local exclusive stores to buy the “latest” status symbol products flaunted by the new family. 

The movie is based on the notion that we humans make expensive purchases attempting to deal with anxiety (using our Emotional Guidance Systems) rather than making purchases based on facts and actual requirements of life (using our Thinking Guidance Systems).  If you’re a newbie, search mysteryshrink for futher info.

Dateline: Austin, Texas, an August like this one.  106 and climbing.

Setup:  I am locked inside the small square bathroom hacked out of the backside of the metal building. The front section of the business is kept cool with two hearty window units. The bathrooms, however, are not air-conditioned and have no windows.  In prisons they call such a place “the hole.”  Amazingly, I’m the one responsible for the sweat pouring down my body, the shallow breathing…the fading consciousness.

I am 14 and working in a family owned hamburger stand operating out of a portable metal structure. 

I have locked myself in.  The misery is my own choosing.  I am grateful for the hiding place. 

Every few minutes, I crack the metal door, suck in a bit of outside air (106 air is way cooler than the atmosphere in my self-made dungeon) and peek out to see if “the” car had pulled away.  The car is a Cadillac which had brought several of my riding buddies, quite by accident, for a quick lunch in the working side of Austin.  I’d spotted them when they were unloading with barely enough time to run from behind my take-out window, shoot my co-worker an emergency look, slam out the side door, and shut myself safely away from the world in the bathroom/sauna. 

Why would a here-to-for reasonable appearing young lady take such an extreme measure?  The same reason a person pays a thousand dollars for a pair of designer frame glasses or three thousand dollars for a purse.  And when did “designer” become a reason to overpay?  Do people out there think the Chinese company producing clothing for the rest of us…didn’t bother to “design” the outfits?

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