The Aesthetic

Dear Last Night’s Sunset,

Just a quick note to let you know that I wasn’t impressed by your effort last night. If you want get noticed, you’re going to have to do a lot better – more color, more rays of light, more dramatic wind, more ethereal clouds, more everything. Apparently, you have forgotten that this is California, and that people here have been scrutinizing sunsets for hundreds of years. That mess last night might have impressed the folks in St. Louis, but it just won’t fly here. We look at 365 sunsets a year. Some of us have lived here for decades and seen thousands of them. So, it’s safe to say that we know a thing or two about the subject. We know what a good one looks like: how much orange and red you need in the sky, how blue the water should be, exactly how much sun you need. And it’s not like we keep this stuff a secret. You can’t claim ignorance. We’ve got pictures of the good ones on postcards and calendars in every gift shop. Local artists and photographers sell them by the pound. But you, no, you don’t seem to need any advice. You just come traipsing in with that freak show of yours and think we’ll get all sentimental.

You have no doubt heard the phrase “Realtor Shock,” which describes the reaction when one meets an agent for the first time in person and is stunned to find that he or she nothing like the picture in the newspaper. Well, no person is more responsible for that impression than Veronica LaDuffy, who single-handedly invented Realtor photo rejuvenation back in the 1970s. She was working at a Photomat when a friend confessed that her business was flagging. Veronica suggested a zippy new photo for her ad, and Voila, a new business model was born. Now LaDuffy has franchises in every major city in the country. Her methods are no secret – a high school yearbook photo, a little Photoshop, maybe even the use of a teenage daughter’s photo – it’s the audacity that is her trademark style.

And so Simone leaned forward and said: “I love the Facebook.” (She was always doing that, adding the definite article in front of words that didn’t require it. She believed it made her sound foreign). “I signed up last month, and immediately all these people I hadn’t seen in years began sending me friend requests. People from my childhood, from high school, college, long lost members of my family. I enjoyed it greatly, then it struck me that Facebook wasn’t unlike death — my whole life was flashing before my eyes.” She sipped her coffee. “But then, of course, I didn’t die. Now I have 569 friends.”

Rodrigo always fantacized about being in one of those period movies with some kind of awesome gun. You know that scene in Braveheart where the evil king’s men have finally caught Mel Gibson, and they’re torturing him in front of a crowd? Well, Rodrigo always imagined walking up to the podium with an Uzi and laying waste to all the guards. So when he woke up one morning in the Middle Ages with an M-16 on the grass next to him, he knew exactly what to do. The Black Knight never knew what hit him.

“That,” she explained, “is the Nothing Button.”

“What does it do?”

She took a breath. “Well, you have your other buttons that make it go up or down, left or right. They all do things. Well, this button, the orange one with the big N on it, isn’t like that. It’s the one you push when you don’t want anything to happen.”

“So it does nothing.”

“Exactly, nothing. It’s the Nothing Button.”

“I don’t get it,” he replied. “Why have a button for nothing. If you don’t want anything to happen, you could just not press any buttons.”

“Well, yes, you could do that. But then it’s not a choice. The Nothing Button is important because is lets you make an action out of doing nothing. You push it, but nothing happens. You see?”

And it was right then, while standing in the CVS greeting card aisle searching for a mildly funny but not sexual birthday card for a colleague he could not stand, that Seymour hit upon the idea that would change his life, and the world: greeting cards that instead of expressing friendship or love, expressed hatred, anger, revulsion and distaste. He started small, with a line of cards with flowers on the front and messages that simply read “Actually, I don’t care that it’s your birthday” and “You’re frankly not that special to me.” These he sold out of his car at swap meets to adoring crowds of people who could not buy enough. Soon, he was selling “Fuck you on your anniversary” cards to some of the edgier card shops downtown. Just a year later, he was moving millions of pieces in a variety of themes. Insults were popular, such as “You’re a jerk” and “I hope you’re sick a few more days,” but so too were the honest ones with simple messages, such as “You’re actually not that funny” and “When I get on the phone with you all I can think about is ending the call as quickly as possible.” Now, 13 years later, Seymour’s simple idea has become an empire, fostering an entire new medium of insult around the world. It was recently calculated that nearly 20 percent of all the nasty things said to anyone last year was conveyed either in one of his cards or through one of his numerous online applications.

And so the strangest political success story of the early 21st Century had to be the emergence of the Non-liberal Democratic Party, which began the decade as a mere Facebook fan page, but emerged as one of the most potent political and cultural machines ever unleashed upon the American mainstream. After finding little success with a platform that demonized all creative thought as morally dangerous, the movement narrowed its focus to fiction, which its leaders derided as frivolous and anti-intellectual. This anti-fiction movement was perhaps cemented in the psyche of most Americans when party presidential candidate Milton Lefebure shouted “Does Huck Finn tell me how to fix a television set? Can Holden Caulfield make anything with his hands?” Lefebure was elected by a landslide that November, and Amazon.com closed its fiction category just seven months later.

By the time he was in his 20s, he had perfectly cultivated the ability to give others the impression that he was a surfer – although he could count on one hand the number of times that he had actually surfed. No, he never lied. Instead, he had learned many years earlier that all he needed was a smattering of lingo and enough of the basic concepts to lead people to the wrong conclusion. A casual mention that he was up at dawn. Noting that the wind was offshore on a particular morning. Observing that an unusually strong riptide had developed at a particular beach. Moreover, he knew that people were never fooled by those dressing the part or adopting too much slang. No, all he had to do was say that he grew up at the beach, and get that faraway look in his eye. And people would always assume.

There was a doctor once who diagnosed Olivia’s disorder merely by making up a latin term for her unusual habit of falling asleep whenever anyone said something mean to her. But he didn’t have a remedy, or even a decent temporary treatment. And so this odd problem she had that first manifested on her preschool playground plagued her all through her youth, peaking perhaps with her first real boyfriend, a real dick, who used to prod her constantly on her outfits, her weight, her laugh. Nonetheless, the relationship lasted longer than it might ordinarily have due to the fact that she slept through most of the worst parts. But she survived that, and went on to become one of this state’s finest senators. Of course, her condition prompted her to fall asleep during most of the campaign, and it was awkward when, during the first debate, she drifted off during her opponent’s opening remarks. But her falling asleep was interpreted not as a sign of weakness, but rather impatience with a petulant opponent. She won handily.

For more than 25 years, Danny Canyon was the great city’s most celebrated helicopter traffic reporter. In this place where the collective psyche was so linked to traffic and travel times, Canyon possessed an uncanny ability to know exactly where to hover his chopper and how to correctly read the impact of everything from a routine fender bender to a multi-vehicle fatality. When a tanker truck flipped over on the Hollywood Freeway back in ’04, spreading hydrogen sulfide gas into neighboring communities, it was Canyon who identified that it would back up the Pasadena Freeway all the way to Orange Grove Avenue. And when that school bus collided with the Metrorail train in ’09, Canyon was the first to suggest the 2 as a shortcut. And so things went well for Canyon until the morning on his day off when his Audi struck the corner of a yellow Accord and spun in front of a garbage truck on the San Diego Freeway. He was listening to his own station just before the accident, and as the fire crept closer to his pinned legs, he could hear his weekend replacement, Tommy Tam, calling the accident from a chopper above. As Tommy described the backup and possible detours, Canyon cried to no one’s ears, “I’m burning here, for Christ’s sake. My suffering is not a Sigalert!”