We've just spent six days in Los Angeles over the Thanksgiving
holidays and received a big hit of urban madness from a real world class
metropolitan area. While waiting for the trailers to run at the movie theater at
Century City in Beverly Hills I saw a commercial that really summed it up (and
in the most appropriate place). It was an ad for
http://crave.honda.com. You
can read about their ad campaign
here
and
here. The second site states:

The crave-themed campaign celebrates the essence of consumer
desires.

Of course, the whole point of advertising is to create those
desires, or to build hard wired desires into more specific and monetarily useful
desires. LA is a cauldron of desire, especially for cars, but for houses, and
the stuff that goes in houses, and clothes, and just stuff and more stuff.


The assault is relentless and pitiless. You must constantly maintain your
vigilance against this desire producing machine just to stay on an even keel.
Just to be happy with the super abundance that you already have you have to deny
and ignore the pleas of so much of the LA environment that says that there is so
much more that you need. It wants you running just to keep in one place.


I go to LA to visit my brother and my mother and I certainly enjoyed the
wonderful flying at Kagel (and hope to do more there). I have to really fight
hard in my head against these evil influences, that want to stick noxious memes
into the machinery. Not always successfully.


Human beings (all of us) are driven so strongly by their desire for the good
opinion of their fellow beings. The status that all these goods provide is
inordinately seductive, as well as a false god, of course.


I fight hard to convince folks that flying a Wills Wing Falcon 3 - 170 is as
cool as flying a Wills Wing T2 or an AIR ATOS VR.