Just for a change, I thought I’d like to do something current. This is the first draft of The Discloth Will See You Now, an epic devaluation of the human race or whatever this travesty is pretending to be.
“it’s the world’s first entirely schmaltz-based interior. It has every known level of kitsch and a degree of banality that makes even the least aspirational interiors look great. You can actually use it as an anesthetic and a sort of embalming kit.
The color scheme includes all industry-accepted psychoses, and a special nook for relatives you can’t find a use for, with little burrowing niches. There are even spaces for small wars.”
The sales-thing paused to look smug amid the odd mix of total tat, mank, and maudlin-looking bric a-brac. The hideous suit of no decipherable spectrum seemed pleased with itself, too.
A flying mobile with little families suspended in mid-air squeaked reassuringly. Dressed in pleasantly forgettable garbage, they pottered around performing domestic tasks. It was like a soap opera, just more useful.
In the childish window, carefully made of pure crayon, an exterior vista of trundling buffoons was to be seen, trundling to non-existent destinations. (If you call it commuting, it sounds like a threat. Call it trundling, and you can’t take it seriously.)
A fake screen kept up a tirade of images for those who assume there is such a thing as information and that anyone wants to know about it. The whole science of communication felt so much better after it was invented.
So did they-there-oughta-coulda-sort-of-might-and-gone-and-hadda human critter-varmints-noises. It was one of the greatest breakthroughs in psychology to simply provide people with things they didn’t have to think or do anything about.
The net result was that any amount of crap could be offloaded to humans with a clear conscience at great profit. They even developed a Pointlessness Scale by which to measure the values.
One of the highest rating Pointlessnesses was a tiny person yelling silently into a phone. This invaluable design element is usually set on a mantlepiece or house guest. People liked that because they could ring the little phone and block all incoming calls for decades. Some people even said it allowed them to breathe for their own reasons for the first time in years.
The kitchen décor was even more inspired. The kitchen had various organic substances embedded in it so that it could never be clean. The cabinets oozed bits of pizza and anonymous fluids which were eventually eaten by the floor.
Minimalism effectively gave way to a far more invigorating human experience called apathy. Even a trained mold was employed so you didn’t have to create one for yourself. This helpful mold, wearing fluorescent socks, would amble about being helpful and adding stenches where required. The mold could go anywhere you wanted.
The new décor is designed to achieve a flawless mix of utter crap and human indifference. Even the most depraved wallpaper pervert could never attain this level of mediocrity at gunpoint.
(You’ll be pleased to know that was exactly how they researched it. The most bullet-riddled remains simply couldn’t equal the lack of aspiration in the décor.)
The matter of color schemes was resolved simply by dunking would-be clients in a healthful mix of toxins and seeing what they looked like when they cleaned themselves off. Their preferences were inevitably for colors in which they were camouflaged to the point of invisibility.
For those with families, bassinets were surrounded with a harmless adhesive which the kids couldn’t get out of until they were ten or older. Food was delivered by drone. They were provided with some options to solve the mobility and access problems. The kids naturally developed bridge-building techniques, hang gliding, agriculture, and so forth,
The usual result was that they had multiple degrees by the time they found their way into the living room. The parents often obtained intellectual property that set them up for life. The resulting baby boom was entirely coincidental.
The net result was that humanity achieved something by doing nothing or less. Philosophers dined out on that for many generations. Artistically, it was on a par with Duh…Hyuckism as an art form and mode of style or some other unnecessarily verbalized crud.
The sales-thing looked at the two skeptical border collies. One of them had raised an eyebrow, a potentially difficult sign. It’s hard to convince border collies of anything.
That eyebrow made the perfectly reasonable point without words: “Where do we fit into this joint?”
Fortunately, the sales-thing had done a workshop at the Equivocal Décor Institute. The unforgettable words of its mental mucker-out rang in the sales-thing’s mind: “Do the deal already even kinda during sorta.”
The sales-thing made its winning pitch accordingly.
“….And palaces for the dogs, of course.”
The deal was signed by various flunkies of no fixed species. The sales-thing paid the border collies a few million dollars, and all was well.
One of the border collies asked the other, “What did you think of that sales spiel?”
“Meh.”