Read Online Cake or Death by Heather Mallick - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Heather Mallick
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novel
The Realms of Gold
(yes, I can find a literary reference for Brookstone. Did you think I couldn’t?), where her citified heroine, long distant from her childhood rural life, is horrified to come upon a crowd of adults in a field “turning” stones. It unfolds that they are clearing the stones for a children’s playground. Later, in a rural museum, she sees an eel stang used for “turning” eels. Of course, she misread it. It’s for trapping eels.
Why would you turn an eel? And why would you build a pool whose water you won’t touch and why not go for a walk instead of walking in place indoors to nowhere? It’s the equivalent of harvesting rocks and spinning eels of an afternoon. But my objections would mystify the Brookstones, even stripped of the Drabble observations. It’s gear, it’s stuff, buy it, Brookstone urges.
Next comes comfort. Mattress pads, slippers, neck pillows, mattresses, and that most hideous thing, the massage chair. They cost about five grand. They look like giant black lumps in your living room, like Darth Vader in
Star Wars
if he sat down and you sat on him and his wholebody quivered until you shook and shivered. It comes with a CD player in the headrest.
On the American sitcom
Frasier
, the sturdy and sensible Marty Crane once sat on one of these massage chairs that had Daphne and everyone else cooing. A horrified look appeared on Marty’s face as he registered the sensation of the chair beneath him. “That’s disgusting!” he shouted.
And it is, because it is suitable for someone who knows they will never again be embraced by another human being. You sit in the chair and the rollers hum up and down your back and your calves are squeezed and your feet rumbled and every part of your body is stroked and vibrated and quivered and oh it is wonderful wonderful and then you realize that your moaning has everyone in the high-end stereo shop staring at you with … understanding.
These are the socially acceptable black leather La-Z-Boy equivalents of blow-up sex dolls with skin that feels real and a vagina and anus that heat up. Call it what you like, Brookstone, but a massage chair is an admission of defeat. The whole catalogue is an homage to failure, but Brookstone doesn’t care to see it that way. The stuff sells.
Then there’s novelty sound gear, plus, for some reason, a lamp with a small silver Harley-Davidson motorcycle as a base. No ginger jars for Brookstone. The shade is imprinted with dozens of classic photos of unspecified classic … things. “The lamp also briefly revs its engine when turned on.”
Then there’s tooth-care stuff, but I don’t care about teeth.
You can buy a device that measures your heart rate as you exercise, while tracking your speed and distance. The weird part is that it comes with a global positioning system device that tells you precisely where you are on the planet. But knowing the Brookstone customer, you’re wearing this indoors on your treadmill, so this is just sad, if not scary. Brookstone’s implying that you’re trekking the Himalayan foothills but I suspect
someone’s
still in their rec room watching a Rick Steves “Let’s Go to Prague” travel show.
There are other devices. A turquoise Panasonic Epilator for instance. It plucks as it shaves as it holds skin down “with minimal pain,” but if it mistook a bump for a hair, I can see things going badly wrong and my entire armpit being sucked into a hand-held. Hand-held what? the emergency room people will ask. I’m not sure, I’ll say. They’ll be pulling strips of skin out of the blades and trying to stick them back on my scarlet underarms. I think not.
The motion-activated soap dispenser would have pleased Howard Hughes in his later dementia but I see all kinds of problems for the sane. Sure, you don’t have to pump your soap but you still have to turn taps off and on, use a towel and then a doorknob. Germs lurk. It’s not a question of touching. They’re in the air.
The Realms of Gold
(yes, I can find a literary reference for Brookstone. Did you think I couldn’t?), where her citified heroine, long distant from her childhood rural life, is horrified to come upon a crowd of adults in a field “turning” stones. It unfolds that they are clearing the stones for a children’s playground. Later, in a rural museum, she sees an eel stang used for “turning” eels. Of course, she misread it. It’s for trapping eels.
Why would you turn an eel? And why would you build a pool whose water you won’t touch and why not go for a walk instead of walking in place indoors to nowhere? It’s the equivalent of harvesting rocks and spinning eels of an afternoon. But my objections would mystify the Brookstones, even stripped of the Drabble observations. It’s gear, it’s stuff, buy it, Brookstone urges.
Next comes comfort. Mattress pads, slippers, neck pillows, mattresses, and that most hideous thing, the massage chair. They cost about five grand. They look like giant black lumps in your living room, like Darth Vader in
Star Wars
if he sat down and you sat on him and his wholebody quivered until you shook and shivered. It comes with a CD player in the headrest.
On the American sitcom
Frasier
, the sturdy and sensible Marty Crane once sat on one of these massage chairs that had Daphne and everyone else cooing. A horrified look appeared on Marty’s face as he registered the sensation of the chair beneath him. “That’s disgusting!” he shouted.
And it is, because it is suitable for someone who knows they will never again be embraced by another human being. You sit in the chair and the rollers hum up and down your back and your calves are squeezed and your feet rumbled and every part of your body is stroked and vibrated and quivered and oh it is wonderful wonderful and then you realize that your moaning has everyone in the high-end stereo shop staring at you with … understanding.
These are the socially acceptable black leather La-Z-Boy equivalents of blow-up sex dolls with skin that feels real and a vagina and anus that heat up. Call it what you like, Brookstone, but a massage chair is an admission of defeat. The whole catalogue is an homage to failure, but Brookstone doesn’t care to see it that way. The stuff sells.
Then there’s novelty sound gear, plus, for some reason, a lamp with a small silver Harley-Davidson motorcycle as a base. No ginger jars for Brookstone. The shade is imprinted with dozens of classic photos of unspecified classic … things. “The lamp also briefly revs its engine when turned on.”
Then there’s tooth-care stuff, but I don’t care about teeth.
You can buy a device that measures your heart rate as you exercise, while tracking your speed and distance. The weird part is that it comes with a global positioning system device that tells you precisely where you are on the planet. But knowing the Brookstone customer, you’re wearing this indoors on your treadmill, so this is just sad, if not scary. Brookstone’s implying that you’re trekking the Himalayan foothills but I suspect
someone’s
still in their rec room watching a Rick Steves “Let’s Go to Prague” travel show.
There are other devices. A turquoise Panasonic Epilator for instance. It plucks as it shaves as it holds skin down “with minimal pain,” but if it mistook a bump for a hair, I can see things going badly wrong and my entire armpit being sucked into a hand-held. Hand-held what? the emergency room people will ask. I’m not sure, I’ll say. They’ll be pulling strips of skin out of the blades and trying to stick them back on my scarlet underarms. I think not.
The motion-activated soap dispenser would have pleased Howard Hughes in his later dementia but I see all kinds of problems for the sane. Sure, you don’t have to pump your soap but you still have to turn taps off and on, use a towel and then a doorknob. Germs lurk. It’s not a question of touching. They’re in the air.
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