To acknowledge the sheer power corporations wield over your every waking moment is to trigger existential dread so deep and vast, it might be one of those black holes that eat planets alive.
Said dread boiled up in me last week, as I stood in my kid's kindergarten classroom and listened to his teacher review the students' daily schedules at the dawn of their elementary school existence. I wore a David Bowie t-shirt and black shorts -- nothing out of the ordinary for me in the final days of summer. It was the length of my shorts, about three inches above the top of my kneecap, that forced me face to face with the nightmare: I was a prisoner of Big Shorts. Or in this case, Big Little Shorts.
Feeling comfortable and fashionable in my new shorts would've struck me as unfathomable when I stood in school not as a dad with a rapidly growing population of grey facial hairs, but as a student. For years as a typically insecure teenager, I fought the good fight against short shorts because the cool kids weren't wearing short shorts. The boys who girls liked wore shorts below their knee cap, sometimes by a few inches. These were big-ass shorts for skinny-assed kids. Some of these baggy shorts reached the middle of the shin, which today, twenty years later, seems ludicrous. Would I rather self immolate in the public square (Starbucks) than wear a monstrous pair of shorts that reach my shin? Maybe not, but it's close. Really close.
I spent untold years fretting that my shorts were too short. I tugged every day at my green gym shorts, hoping to cover enough of my thighs without yanking them too far and revealing my entire ass. Every time I sprinted down the basketball court, the shorts rode up, back to my waste, where they belonged. It was the nightmare: to be before peers donning shorts a couple inches above the knee. This wasn't 1984. I wasn't Larry fucking Bird. I was much cooler than Larry fucking Bird. So I tugged on those mesh gym shorts until they were once again on the verge of falling down to my ankles. It was a constant struggle to look cool in the perpetual popularity contest that is high school.
Why, I asked myself during my silent crisis near the play kitchen in the kindergarten classroom, has the taste in shorts change so dramatically since the second Clinton administration? The answer was almost enough to make me bite a hole in the head of a nearby teddy bear: because my corporate overlords told me what shorts to wear.
Those who dictate fashion and clothing trends and how we waste our money told teenage me in no uncertain terms that you, young man, will wear big, long shorts, and you'll like it. That same faceless capitalist specter told me as a grizzled 35 year old that you, not-so-young man, will wear short shorts, tight around the hips, and you will like it. In fact, my corporate deity said, it'll make you feel good -- even superior.
And I did it all without thinking. The shorts were just there, in the store, for me to buy. So I bought them. It's the definition of being unconscious, operating as a machine on automatic, the manual option disabled by the fierce power of the system in which we exist. They're only shorts, I tell myself. No one cares. But the ease with which I bend to the will of the omnipotent corporate overlord is frightening. What other trend of belief has been installed in my brain? What else have I adopted unconsciously? Probably the answer is indeed a black hole from which there is no return.