Whores! All of You

Across the office everyone is having kittens about an email from MTV. Apparently they’ve bought our snow job and are willing to stump up their precious airtime to publicise some masturbatory guitar exhibit we’re ‘curating’ courtesy of Fender, and a bunch of creative whores.

My boss is currently a blast furnace of egotistical joy, stoked with a dozen ideas and the heady scent of money just beyond his fingertips. Technically, I should be at least glad because if the company doesn’t make money I don’t have a job. But I can’t bring myself to give a flying fuck. Not now, or in the foreseeable future. Marketing is bullshit, obviously, and I’ve always known that. This is the first time I’ve felt that though. It’s so lame, so old hat: the ego, the money, the who’s doing a better flim flam job than whom. And the constant, exhausting lying. Lies by rote. Lies you tell when you know that they know that you’re lying but you feel obliged to lie anyway.
Christ knows my objections aren’t moral, or even ethical, at best they’re maybe aesthetic. I swear all the crawling, smarming, back-slapping, and soul-sucking eats the guts of the people who do it. You start judging everyone on what they can do for you, or how much they make. Everything is about image and status. And god, I thought I loved that all as much as the next media whore. The ‘I was in the VIP room with so-and-so’ or ‘oh yeah, I know so-and-so – but maybe I don’t really have the stomach for it.

I can’t feel anything but weary contempt for my boss, who practically wet himself with joy recounting his meeting with some aging pop star. ‘She’s so humble, she really doesn’t see herself as a star.’ Of course you stupid prick, she’s not going to pull the big I Am with you because you’re too much of a nobody to even arouse her ego sensors.

And it’s not just him. Our finance manager: “I was at this amazing party and I looked up and guess who was dancing next to me: Sting!” He looked hurt at my response: “Well, apart from that it sounds okay.”

Or my colleague who simply cannot let a name go undropped. I mention an attractive Hollywood star. “I snogged him once.” But of course…

I mean fuck, I enjoy goggling at Heat as much as the next person, but this gutless, witless, slavish pandering at the alter of ‘someone you may have heard of’ bores me to fucking tears. Where’s the door, guys? I want out.