Brand Disloyalty

More on this later.

I've written a bunch of times in the past year about how ridiculous our American society has become. Along with most other advanced, industrial countries, when it comes to consuming, we've become a lot like a bunch of bees at a Sunday picnic -- all spinning around crazily as we fly toward the person with the jar of honey.

You can hardly go anywhere without seeing a logo or a mark or an ad. People walk around wearing clothes with other peoples' names on them: "Donna", "Tommy", and "Paris". So much for the days when your mom stitched your name into the collar.

We watch commercials with real actors pretending to be real people feeling common feelings dreamt up in a room by a bunch of ad execs and tested against folks like you and me who sit behind one-way mirrors while market researchers quantify and qualify their answers.

Billboards on the road, 30 pages of ads in a 40 page magazine, commercials above the urinals in the men's room. Sometimes it all seems like a bit much doesn't it?

I used to belong to a gym that perpetuated this way of life. The women all wore the same type of workout clothes (which wasn't entirely a bad thing), the TVs were all set to CNBC or the Fox News Channel, the bathrooms all had ads for some hair care product. Believe it or not, I grew a bit tired of this show -- decided that I needed to strike out a little and exercise in peace; because that's what exercise is supposed to be: a break -- not another place to be sold -- and if, like me, you don't have the time to get out and surf or ride a bike of hill, you take the best you can get.

So I joined a small gym in West L.A. Kinda short hours, showers out of a Danish motel, hand-written sign in sheet and hardly any people. Just good machines and plenty of room. I'll tell you how much I like it. Last weekend I go in to get my heart going above it's normal stagnant rate and work my biceps into rock-hard chicken wings. I'm sitting at one of the machines between sets, listening to "Mr. Jones" by the Talking Heads, when "E", the owner walks in.

E is a funny guy. I'm not exactly sure what country he's from but he's got a kind of Fabio thing going -- long hair, baggy linen shirts, confident stride -- only problem is he's not as tall and he's not blonde (is Fabio really or is the rug a different color?) E likes to come into the office and turn bad disco or easy listening on the gym's stereo system. Today E's wearing a brown suede jacket with those little tassle thingies on it. He walks in, unlocks his office and comes out a few seconds later wearing a red tank-top and white shorts ala Richard Simmons, walks past me (I give him the standard guy head-nod of acknowledgement) and disappears into the back of the gym as I start my next set.

I'm resting after the set and I see E out of the corner of my eye, pulling one of those huge Life Cycle exercise machines across the carpet. I'm thinking he's re-decorating. He pulls the thing for 130 feet, right past me. I'm thinking this is some strange form of Fabionic exercise. He parks the thing right in front of the TV suspended from the ceiling, puts his hair in a ponytail and changes the channel to VH1, which is, at that moment, playing "Separate Ways" by Journey. (See, I told you I would get to it). He gets on the bike, oblivious to the rest of the people around him and starts pedaling his way back to the 70's.

It makes me smile. Thank God for people like E. They remind me that what's most important is not what all the other bees like, it's what I like. I define what I want and what I need. It's my picnic.