How I Plan to Save the World through Greeting Cards

How the fuck does Facebook know where I’ve been even when I don’t have an iPhone? Or any smart phone. I lost mine and have an old dumb phone while I contemplate my next move.

Apparently I was at Pilar NM a year ago and Zozobra a year later, but I didn’t post that. I don’t want to know where I’ve been and I certainly don’t want anyone else to know. I find being tracked unnerving. What am I, the elusive and nearly extinct Jaguar? In fact I’ve been known to call people with iPhones and lie about where I am, just to create a false trail. “Yep, I’m at an Allsup’s in Gallup. Great price on cigarettes.”

How does FB know where I’ve been? I don’t post anything other than political commentary, satire, stupid comments about Windows 10, research about BSS (Bernie Supporter Syndrome) and bits of performance video in order to find out how many people I can piss off at the same time before someone tracks me down and beats me to death with their iPhone. It’s all about livin’ on the edge.

Yes, posting on FB is pretty much narcissism deluxe, but I figure with everyone else bombarding me with posts they should go to therapy for, and re-posting happy inspirational sayings that I find completely irrelevant, shallow and stupid, I am allowed to post my irreverent bullshit too. Until Trump gets elected and Stupid finally wins and we are reduced to grunting and rudimentary symbols.

If wise inspirational sayings worked on anything, the world would have changed by now and so would I. I did the research online and in reality. I’ve stood in Hallmark day after day reading all those cards and WOW, both world and I HAVEN’T CHANGED A BIT.

In fact, I think there might be a little understood correlation between Greeting Card Inspirational Failure and Trump Insanity Disorder, also known as the GOP’s real agenda. Their greeting card should be: YES WE REALLY ARE THIS BAD.

But wait, maybe there is time to save the world from us. And I think it might have to do with marketing a whole new set of greeting cards. And I’m just the woman for the job.

How Greeting Cards Have Failed Us

The first thing I did is go to Shaman School, which is very easy to do since I live in Santa Fe, home of the International Stolen Shamanism for White People. In one weekend, I learned the time honored technique of Speaking with the Dead and boy are they a boring fucking bunch.

So I went back to the well I’ve been dipping in since I was 20: reading dead philosophers, psychologists and authors. I figured talking to them might be even better and it was. They agreed with me that greeting cards suffer from a sophomoric lack of depth. Then I called Hallmark and proposed a line of greeting cards derived from Frederick Nietzsche. Here are 2 samples.

Sample 1:

Hi! God is Dead.

(Open the card)

Thinking of you!

 

Sample 2

Ubermenche.

(Open the card)

Are you in?

 

Then we branched out to Martin Heidegger:

What do you get when you cross Being with Time?

         

You’re right! A chicken!

 

If you didn’t find that funny, don’t worry, there’s more. Something for everyone. And a little known fact that the chicken crossing the road joke originated in pre-world war II Germany. What people don’t know is that the chicken was crossing the road to get away from German philosophers and most likely made it into France where Jean Paul Sartre’s greeting cards were all the rage at that time.

No Exit?

(open card)

Me too!

 

When I contacted Camus with the Oujia board, he made this classic contribution:

          “What’s the point?”

         

(Blank inside: write your own message)

 

Not to leave out the deceased psychologists from the school of psychoanalytic object relations for Valentine’s, we came up with this soon-to-be classic:

You are so my part-object.

 

 

 

Let’s do the depressive position!

 

And then of course we can’t leave out Hemmingway. It’s a little known fact that Hallmark actually contracted with Hemmingway for a line of greeting cards way back when.  One of them read something like this

“I think I might love you,” she said.

(open card)

He took a drink and looked out the window. There was a mountain. Then the avalanche came. 

 

That card wasn’t very successful. We suspect it was before its time.

I tried modernizing it and throwing in some science. Hemmingway seems like he might have enjoyed the clarity and succinctness of science.

There was the Big Bang.

 

 

 

And then we drank.

 

We are still testing this one.

If Facebook got hold of all this it would say something asinine like:

Debbie was at the Big Bang 2015.

 

Well, I guess it’s still happening somewhere.

 

If you have a greeting card suggestion in similar vein we’d love to hear from you. Hit the Reply button at the bottom of the blog. If it makes me laugh, I’ll post it on Facebook! And I will love you forever.  (Imagine heart emojis here. I invested all my money in greeting cards with enough depth to save the world and now I can’t afford emojis!)

Sincerely,

Laughing Coyote