Diary of a Home Shopping Network Junkie

5/19/2022         (debtor’s prison, Stryker Ohio)

[Oh, Home Shopping Network… you used to be comfort food for thoughtlessness thrumming like a pernicious sweet tooth, the rot fomenting under the surface. I loved you since I was a strange young man working manual labor during the hours when most folks slept. I never bought anything from you then. I was paying off student loans and fiscally smarter because Mom and Dad were watching. They are again now that I’ve hit them up for emergency assistance. Ha ha. Joke’s on me. The index will be just fine. But, back then, I was your burgeoning font of consumer potential, on the cusp of real debt and servitude. It wasn’t until all these years later that I became hip to you as the mall of the future. I’ve always had a fetish for malls. Malls are relics. Dead memories.

That fruitcake David® on Home Shopping Network can sell Bose® hearing aids to a bat. He can whip himself into a frenzy over a remote-controlled artificial limb; he could sell it to a six armed, five-legged, three-dicked man. This hearing aid seems like it could be a great spying device to listen in on others’ conversations. As a matter of fact, that’s a great angle for hearing aid manufacturers: surveillance settings. For the geriatric 007 wannabe. Dentures with cameras. Swiss army artificial limbs and implants. Hormone injections. This is a tale for aging boomers. If this were a movie, I would want David from HSN to make a cameo but only briefly. He needs to die within seconds of appearing on screen. Anyone familiar with him would understand. He’s ruined ME!

We all become the mall we most want to see in this world.

The mall nursed them, the old guard, into lazy and voracious parasites. They passed it on and the hunger for static immediacy further stultified a stimulus fried consumer base. The dollar made them holler and the gobblers kept gobbling: land, communities, entire swatches of the continent until all that remained were millions of dead malls… like myself. In this ethereal state we can eat as many air fried Oreos® as our former hearts desired with a Ninja® brand DualZone Air Fryer still in the package waiting in a warehouse in Mckeesport Pennsylvania for a shipment to ‘Good Buys’ (level three) that’ll never happen. It used to be available at Sharper Image, but, no longer. Anyway, the Sharper Image on level two isn’t the same since the water main burst and the family of badgers moved in. At this time, you can only purchase the Ninja® brand air fryer online. No store in my personal mall will ever vibrate with the jolly whine of a receipt printer again. After the flood and fire, the water and electrics were shut off. The signs were extinguished, broken, defaced. The air’s been usurped by mold spore and asbestos flake, floating in sunrays, streaming through shattered skylights, downed drop ceilings. The air’s unstable.

Here I am. Over drafted. Over extended. Stuck in the goo of the deceptively attractive Easy Pay Plan on HSN credit. Here I am: on the verge of evacuation and demolition.

A dead mall in other words. 

In my swampy center: I’m a replicated Chapel Hill Mall, Akron Ohio, circa 1971. It’s always Christmas here, though. Snow swirls through holes in the caved ceiling. Towering center court, the giant stucco snowman sits, a Skeletal Secret Santa, retrocoronated and nestled in that nook where ‘Frosty’s®’ crotch would be.

This screen- augmented portal of trivial issuance- this touchstone of postmortemmodern consciousness targeting my pineal gland, shows people turning the gas on their grills and throwing an entire corpus, possibly the youngest who would logically be the most tender, upon the grate. The gauge goes wild with an earsplitting hiss as needles in Frosty’s® obsidian eyes bounce into the red.

The entire shitshow goes up. The Grillmaster’s, i.e. David’s®, body pieces mix with shredded bits of Rastelli Beef (r), chicken and Play-Mystery-For-Me-Meat. Variable speed shots deploying moments of stop action segments honing minced human muscle, sinew, bone mingling seamlessly with pork, chicken and fish chunks. Some mangled pork short ribs, some of junior’s ribs? Who knows and who cares? There’s an insurance policy.

The object of the game, and it is a game whether we ‘like’ it or not, is to have as many goodies around us for comfort as our teeth are knocked out.

11/23/19         (row house, Hilltop USA)

He’s such a BitTorrent bottom. Now he’s sampling the booze. He prays to Dionysus and sucks his dick until the god dies of cosmic dehydration. David’s® all the richer for it. His paycheck’s dependent on this voracity. After all, ‘foodie’ and ‘gourmand’ are simply doublespeak for ‘glutton’. His cropped hair is crisp with product, glinting in the studio light as his baby hands clutch wine glasses, fondle chicken breasts. He probably looks like a lump of half risen dough with his clothes off— barrel-chested doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Pink lady apple wine. He’ll turn into a pink lady- four on the floor- after a couple of those. (wink wink) The bottom energy is puffed up and strong, here. Drinking silk. Huffing cream.

These hosts with the most mean business in their dense frostings and gold embossings. Today, they’re going in strong on the wino tip.

Now… moving on to this BEAUTIFUL air fryer… it is… hands down… the HOTTEST, JUICIEST air fryer you’ve never known but have so frequently dreamed of in your most vivid, private consumer dreams.

These broads are kweefing champagne fountains over this air fryer.

12/1/19         (row house, Hilltop USA)

Circling back to my favorite fruitcake David® who’s gone live with his Wednesday night three-hour segment. He’s sucking on a plate of mussels with those thin southern lips using those chubby baby mitts.

Wonder what he did for Valentine’s Day?

Probably spent it with his dogs.

And a bottle. 

I am in a zone of cortisol and lethargy. Happy New Year?

There’s a Maya Rudolph doppelganger hocking HP laptops.

All of the male hosts on Home Shopping Network seem gay except for the I.T. nerds. They’re A-sexual, mostly. The majority of the female hosts look like suburban whorebags. Closet nymphos. Plastic surgery and rouge giving great ‘duster head’. Territories are closing quickly. Over thirty-nine thousand sets have already been sold. David® flames out in small ways. I’m sure that this is so the midwestern normtards don’t change the channel to avoid any sort of perverted agenda coming through the airwaves and screen pulses.

Too late.

12/2/19         (row house, Hilltop USA)

When the yuck blows up, David’s® squeegee gets busy… it’s got a telescoping titanium pole. He just told me that GRAY is the most popular home decor ‘color’. Why does this not surprise me? They’ve coined the term ‘greige’- gray beige.

Looks like dead ass.

We like that here. The more dead limbs the merrier.

Mr. Bendable. He’s a clogged aorta of affable exuberance. When the yuck blows up, it’s Mr. Bendable to the rescue!

David® brings up his twenty-year tenure on the network every chance he gets. He’s got a custom line of spatulas with his ‘catch phrases’ printed on them.

Such a fruitcake.

You don’t have to worry about distrusting his culinary abilities because he’s a corpulent fella. They tell you to never trust a skinny cook. Never go to a restaurant with an empty parking lot. Food is obviously the centerpiece of his ad copy life. His ‘in-kitchen arsenal’ is on point. He’s properly disposing of his rendered fats. A seven-inch full tang makes him squeal. So professional. He’s been blessed by some rando ‘Iron Chef’. Someone somewhere cares about this. I’m simply lurking, wondering what I need for my own kitchen. I think maybe all of it. I open the app and start ordering.

Knives from heaven. I can tell an asshole from a Pringle— tell you what.

Iron Chef is calm… slicing a chunk of beef like nothing… I picture his fingers coming off. Everything’s carbon… triple riveted.

What’s up with the charcuterie? Fuck those things. Don’t come at me with all of that. I need a silicone cutting board.

I need a Granite Stone® diamond spike indoor grill- a one-up on the George Foreman® grill. I need a new one. It’s only $19.99. It cooks 22% faster, but I’m too stoned and relaxed to negotiate a phone purchase right now. I don’t want to have to deal with some stranger’s toxic positivity. It’s not the time.

12/17/19         (row house, Hilltop USA)

This new guy here… he likes his powders. Or so he sez.

This other broad is doing a presentation for her company: BADgal BANG!® She’s got the cosmetics. The ultra-black formula! The thirty-six-hour weightless volume! Everybody’s axing for BADgal BANG® It’s national lash week at QVC1.

12/18/19         (row house, Hilltop USA)

Unwinding with Laura Prepon shilling her upscale cookware line on HSC3. She’s definitely diversified. Her line is cleverly called ‘PrepOn®’ Cute, right? She IS a pretty thing, to be sure. She got a board has a juice groove 2 die 4.

I wonder if she fucked around with Wilmer.

Why wouldn’t you? I mean, STI’s notwithstanding, simply double bag it.

Let’s talk polarizing odors.

Where are you, Wilmer?

I want a PrepOn® carbon steel fry pan and I want it inserted directly into you.

Laura Prepon has an industrial kitchen. She’s serious… this is no joke to her, despite her comedic background. She’s been an executive chef since @agetwelve. There are lots of tongue slips and glitched feeds. This is my life blood. The stuff I live for. She’s a businesswoman who cares deeply about culinary issues. She wrote her first cookbook in twenty sixteen. She’s an actress, director, producer and so much more!

From the menu, I carefully select the host that looks most outrageous or spastic. The more unhinged, the tastier. With any luck at all, it’ll be a combo. These broads and broad-dudes boast a plethora of plastic surgeries and severe tans. The exceptions being the tech segment hosts who all look like starved, needy vampires. The job of a QVC/HSN host must be a strange and slightly anxious one. They’re fed constant updates and product information by means of implanted earpieces. It’s the soundtrack to a mouse race in a vast consumer maze. The smiles are stress pressed into their faccia. They must never turn their backs to the camera! They are contractually obligated to find the drunken, giddy delight in a Kuhn Rikon can opener or a blown plastic Christmas tree. They must impart that delight to the target audience, meaning old people like me, but I’m the wurst kind of cuntsoomer.

5/25/22         (debtor’s prison, Stryker Ohio)

[Fail. I’m dwelling on the fail. I want endlessly. The need to reinvest in keeping the minutiae of my day-to-day together has become dire, meaning I’ve now fictionalized my wallet. Locked in a limbo world of indentured servitude, I scramble for self-esteem and breathing room. Consumables never-ending. Don’t mind me. I’m dumb as a dildo. My spirit’s dissolving in a dried-up fountain in front of where Spencer Gifts used to be. Gandalf’s water-damaged cardboard standup leans through the shattered display window, making me feel judged and belligerent. The Lord of the Rings still sucks. He’s got black mold growing down his beard, onto his robes. Pernicious molds, you understand. Sister substances with black goo. It’s in there. I have devolved into a ‘wet ingredients’ pack. This non-locale, this liminal marketplace is the only safe way to shop until you drop. And drop I have.]

12/22/19         (row house, Hilltop USA)

Oh! I want a BOSE® WAVE® Music System Husband w/CD Player & Radio. You touch it, and it farts. Wouldn’t it be nice? Since mine left me for spiraling into a spending frenzy. Lot of good it’s doing me. It’s today’s special for three hundred twenty-nine ninety-nine or five flex pay payments of sixty-six dollars. The excitement is palpable (read: pulped).

They have Iman, David Bowie’s wife, selling some of the most tepid, generic cowl neck sweaters ever. Cowl necks again? They have Isaac Mizrahi, whom I’d like to spoiler alert DECOLLATE.

I have for years. When it wasn’t even cool to want to do that.

[Frosty’s® mouth has been replaced with an 85″ Samsung plasma screen with flaming David ® in his studio kitchen hawking a gas-gauge for propane tanks. The screen’s blue light flickers across broken glass and puddles collected in the cracked tiling of my heart’s vast floor. Weeds and mosses bloom frothy, expansive from crevices eating the place from the bottom up. Escalators loom in time-lapse collapse.]

They have Christie Brinkley unless she thinks she’s grown past it. Christie Brinkley gets a pass on all the games I’m prone to playing tonight. FREE PASS, CB! YA HEAR?

‘Everybody recognizes the name BOZE®!’

‘Nobody can touch this price… this is value!’ Creating a sense of limited resource and urgency is always key.

‘Get on this deal RIGHT NOW! This price lasts only until end of night! Ten thousand ALREADY SOLD!’

‘Sound is air and motion.’

 

These ‘live callers’ are- every one of them- shills. Plants. These BOZE® speakers are powerful enough to BLOZE® your cocaine off the table and your candles out. They don’t market it this way but they should. The first caller sounded like she was that Sunset Boulevard movie actress talking about the BOZE® system she’s owned for twenty-five years which isn’t this model at all. ‘This model’s state of the art!’ This broad sounds like she’s living in the bottom of a rocks glass.

‘The folks @BOZE® KNOW SOUND!’

‘They’ve stayed @thetopofthesoundgame for fifty-eight years!’

‘We’re reaping the rewards!’

Somebody is. Not me. All these spoils have been sold or repo-ed. I’m a chattel slave to my creditors. I haven’t made an adult decision since I was a kid. 

12/3/2020         (Mom & Dad’s, Hilltop USA)

Waking and baking with that big fruit Mr. Bendable, i.e., David®, who’s ‘wetting his plants’ over some gourmet chocolate popcorn. It’s a gut buster, to be sure. He can scarcely contain himself over these saturated foodstuffs. It’s surprising he’s not five hundred pounds by now. The love of food is HIS deadly sin, the one he truly leans all the way into. Shoveling ALL the samples into his gob at warped speed, he’s doing his patented ‘Happy Dance’® and making me ashamed to be in this class of Humanimals.

It’s a guilty pleasure… not the premium cheese steak with ‘the whiz’ sprayed over top… but indulging in a consumer feeding frenzy, the luxury of access.

1/5/21         (Mom & Dad’s, Hilltop USA)

It’s no surprise that ten-ton fruitcake, David®, on Home Shopping Network is pushing max density because he’s constantly cooking and sampling the goodies for his three-hour power jamming segments. He likes his cocktails, too. I get a def ‘hideous kween’ vibe. He plays a jolly old elf in this electronic showroom slash kitchen slash retail wet dream. He’s giving the hard sell on his cookbook today. Work beaters and dough hooks be damned. He’s a red balloon of a man in corporate casual duds. He gooshes when he waddles to and fro, spritzing this and frosting that.

I want to truss him up like a hawg at a roast.

He’s BEGGING for it with his every cookbook plug.

He’s sold over one hundred and fifty thousand of them, you know.

His fucken COOKBOOK, mang!

He’s got the pudgy, soft hands of a baby.

He’s positively creaming his husky Wranglers over some gourmet biscotti.

His head would make a festive holiday ham.

His excitement over these baked goods is palpable enough to make me ad nauseous. His description of his favored way of consuming this biscotti borderline verges on the blue or purple. It’s a religiopsychosexual experience. They’re making biscotti parfaits. They look disgusting and crunchier than any parfait has a right to be.  This is offensive to an entire class of desserts. Abominations!

He’d shove anything, save a pussy, in his cocksucker. Oh… yeah… and kale. He doesn’t care for kale, ‘cukes’ or Brussel’s Sprouts. He’s like a human pastry vacuum. A comfort food giant!

He puts the blow in blowhard, but that’s double plus good for an unforgettable Home Shopping Network host. I’m so stupid, I can’t stay away from his show.

1/6/22         (Mom & Dad’s, Hilltop USA)

WINE

This work week is tiring my mind. Nothing a little Home Shopping Network and some premium wines from that plastic surgery kween can’t mitigate. Tune into that big pud David® for comfort and laffs. He’s terminally jolly, toxically positive, an overinflated tour guide through a privileged consumable purgatory.

I wonder what the rate of alcoholism is amongst the staff in that studio.

He has a camera in his studio fridge. He loves cheesing for that camera when he has to remove a chilled item.

1/17/21         (Mom & Dad’s, Hilltop USA)

Matthew Camp® has a lifesize doll. It’s horrifying. It’s a cold, disturbing facsimile and I kind of want one. If I were a rich man, I’d find a nice nook in which to prop him up. If I were a rich man, though, I’d hire the real Matthew Camp® for random entertainments. The doll is more like a curio. A prop of enflamed will, a projection into a mass masturbatory hallucination. Almost five thousand dollars for this nightmare in cyberflesh. I wonder if there’ll ever be a Home Shopping Network for sex toys.

1/18/21         (Mom & Dad’s, Hilltop USA)

They spun my blood and made a jelly to slather into these gum pockets where my wisdom teeth were. I’m on hydrocodone, steroids and amoxicillin. In bed feeling and reeling with my digital friends @ Home Shopping Network, my face a bloody mess.

Maybe it’s the anesthesia wearing off but I feel like a fly stuck in a web of conspiracy far larger than anything I can conceive of. A global rot, if you will. A world truly in decline. I’m thinking about this as I lie in bed watching QVC2. I’m recuperating, trying not to tongue my torn sockets. Today, not so painful. I’m clicking and looking for my other favourite HSC host whose name is Shawn. She’s batshit amazing. A show with her and David® is an inspired, ne superhuman, sales combo for the ages. Shawn- like David®– gives every shred of herself to her ‘presentations’ {as the hosts call their respective and varied pitches}. They wax fondly and speak often of booze. There are three hosts I look out for…. the third looks like an owl with a tan and lip gloss framing a smile that’s nothing short of spine-tingling.

3/10/21         (Mom & Dad’s, Hilltop USA)

I want to seal the halves of her in his Foodsaver Vacuum Sealer starter kit using an industrial garbage bag. Toss Goodytwoshoes Gifford’s wrapped halves into the La Brea Tar Pits with the other dinosaurs, pour out a bottle of Gifft® Cab on the sidewalk out front in honor of her twinkling service to The Republic.

This dingbat has to be on amphetamines or coke. Her hair is dyed raven black, her skin is golden orange. She has glasses that make her look like an owl. I can’t help but picture her putting the moves on a gaffer. She’s disgusting.

You understand.

Reinventing mascara with weightless volume technology. If your crepe lids are droopy, they won’t get spidery with this particular formula.

These powerful, independent women bring a dizzying, maniacal enthusiasm to the most mundane household items. So much so that I want to buy a month’s supply of mascara.

‘I’m so excited, I’m wetting my plants.’  Says David looking like Baby Huey in his signature apron.

4/30/21         (Mom & Dad’s, Hilltop USA)

Home Shopping Network’s making me feel deficient and more ineffectual than I already do. Apparently, I’m ruining my knives by throwing them in the drawer. I don’t use one of those nasty wooden knife blocks so I’m clean there. I order two sets and an inflatable baby pool for adults.

‘Don’t fight the chicken.’

Pucker pleats. Inmymouth. My gums aren’t healing and the doctor bills are piling up on top of the credit card bills. Easy Pays are autodrafted from my account conveniently enough.

That fat fruitcake isn’t farting around his kitchen, so I switch to Attack of the Eye Creatures. This is a seven out of seven stars, so far.

6/6/2022         (debtor’s prison, Stryker Ohio)

[The frogs sing in chorus in what used to be a beautiful fountain. Its salmon-colored tiles all but obscured with bright green and purple lichens.

No more gun shots on the concourse.

Where have the graffiti wannabe thugmobs gone?

The real men, groypers, rapists and dopers and their female counterparts and…

You can marinade a fucking steak in Coca Cola® and Mentos®?!

David’s® voice echoes, his wattle waxing sweaty with the fervor he’s secreting over butter cream frosting. No one in the mall cares because everyone’s gone. It’s a post-apocalyptic scene. Dig it? Everything’s fallen down and the plasma screen doubling as Frosty’s® mouth is the only sign of ‘life’ left inside this haunted, abandoned place. This expert showperson, this charismatic bullfrog with a penchant for adult beverages and fried chicken, speaks of microns and gorgeous steaks with equal and sufficient slapstick aplomb. His transitions are effortless.

But, David® isn’t here, here. Is he? No. His image only flickers in the pixelated liminal space of this musty, former retail arena, over rolling acres of twinkling broken glass.

Good thing all minds have short-circuited creating the answer to our extinction prayerblasphemes. So no one can hear this gogdammed tree falling or this dead mall mauling. Fursona’s white void is what lie beyond this vacant retail space… the consumer failure point. I’ve died too, at the hands of Dow Jones and the Vanderbilts and, last but not least, myself. Good Lord, yes. Myself. So I’ve gone back to the industrial wasteland of my youth, to the mall of my childhood and allowed my frequencies to invade the space, to settle right in.

My spirit floats through Spencer Gifts®. I’ve always loved Spencer’s. The store with the druggie vibe… least that’s how I remember it from my childhood. Who knows if or what it is today.

Even all the fat people didn’t have enough stock to stay upright. They exist only as frequencies now. Exactly like me. They sizzle and pop in the fire that heats the fryer. All bodies resting below the mall as if it’s their monumental crumbling tombstone. We’ve finally cooled to our ideal resting ambient temperature and bitch face for our eternal emissions.

Look how moist- mold eaten- a showcase gets when left empty, untended, unadmired. The Angus Meat isn’t the only one oozing juice in the place. The only Humanimal action here takes place on that hovering 20 by 10 ft. screen (so if something here had a nose it might smell it. But there isn’t and it won’t). A signal tone sounds in the background, distorted by the radically fluctuating atmospheric conditions. Its pitch phases in and out. The chain reactions of life are ineptly imitated by their replicunts. They made a god of fiber optics and providers available on Easy Pay Plans.

I am a dead, haunted mall.

I’m a Christmas Woolworth’s collapsing to dust.

Entertained a Home Shopping Network earworm. After the gold rush, it’s shoe leather soup and toenail pudding from the trash bin tureen.

Meanwhile Rob Lowe is giving folks health tips via Bob Atkins. Babble on.

He’s cum a long way since boofing prostitutes. Respectable muddle-age. The proof is in the peel- the stories issued from a Weathered Hyde. Works and soon-to-be cut outs. They smolder latent, amorphous. All these insects perish in my dead mall, flypaper heart.]