How To Hypnotize Sea Monkeys

You’re nine and you’ve figured out there’s a lot of stuff being kept secret from you. There’s also a ton of stuff you know for an absolute fact that everybody else is ignoring. You’re surrounded by so much mystery, opportunity and stupidity it’s maddening.

Like a map to Narnia via a suburb of Hades

You know they’re awesome

Your first subject is that girl with the braids

Nine is the threshold of metaphysical awakening, and into your desperate need for mystical knowledge comes the Johnson Smith Company. Their novelty catalog ads are in the back of every super hero comic; unimpugnable proof of honorable business dealings.

The ads have teasers for x-ray glasses and radio pens and your head knows this stuff’s shit but your heart senses there’s something deeper going on. After some brief soul-searching you spring for the fifty cents and wait by the mailbox.

When the catalog arrives, you know you’ve found a map to the grail. On each page of deep, rich, studied chaos are gadgets, gizmos, books and lore that stir profound feelings. You still know the stuff is shit, but it is so forthrightly declared, vastly varied, lavishly illustrated and reasonably priced it’s like an obligation to reward them with your patronage.

Of COURSE they won’t work. That’s not the point.

In so doing, you enter the revealed world of consumerism. Transactional awareness is born; each dime has a newly distinct meaning and each carefully chosen purchase is weighed against the complicit bullshit that commanded your attention versus the intrinsic value of the object itself. Full awareness you’re being gulled is measured in token for the materialized evidence of your need to be gulled. Johnson Smith and Company knew every inch of the gullibility terrain, and they took you straight to it, like Oz cheerfully yanking open the curtain.

It’s good to see the Johnson Smith Company still thriving, with a robust website and a Better Business Bureau A+ rating. They still carry stuff they had 50 years ago but have shed their formerly demure prurient offerings for borderline porn and feature the like of infomercial gadgetry and Star Trek phasers. “Live long and prosper” suits this iconic company. Metaphysics of this order shouldn’t be left to amateurs.