While I idle in front of Famous Footwear, I watch a man doing air duster in an old Hyundai. He’s reclined in his seat, his crusty left-foot sneaker resting on the frame of the open driver’s side window—the can is barely visible, just the black cap and red mosquito-mouth nozzle. There’s no one else in the car.
We are sitting side-by-side in the middle of a strip mall parking lot off of Quebec, east of Denver. People come here for the Walmart, mostly.
At the edge of the lot, a man in a long green coat wanders alone, occasionally peering into car windows and screaming to himself. I think about driving somewhere else, but my doctor said I needed new shoes and I’ve always gone to Famous Footwear.
A few weeks ago, my foot swelled up and I couldn’t walk for days. The doctor said it was metatarsalgia and suggested I get new shoes, try gel padding or something. My day job may be sedentary, but I walk miles and miles delivering magazines on nights and weekends. I’ve never been this overworked before, and I worry about the effects. Nothing crazy so far, but there have been a few gradual alterations since I started the business. Of course, my diet’s been off. I’ve been gaining weight, but my friend Charlie said that would happen. Facing three eviction notices and vomiting from anxiety during his first year of business, he would look in the mirror and apprehend himself as “a bag of milk.”
“Make sure you take care of yourself,” he warned me, but I don’t think I have. My stress levels are redlining. Last fall I got an EKG after dealing with some chest pain. There’s this foot issue. And then I worry about my mind. I don’t really read for pleasure or study anymore. I don’t watch challenging films. I don’t go to art galleries. Instead I watch a lot of online junk—letting the great algorithm take the wheel.
I don’t even really enjoy the things I’m watching. It’s more of an anesthesia, a warm bath. An hour-long documentary about 90s rollerblading. A deep dive into the history of a computer game I’ve never played or heard of. I once interviewed a popular YouTuber for a tech magazine. He ran an infotainment channel, with millions of subscribers, but he’d also received a PhD in science education. For his dissertation, he’d examined the effectiveness of video learning. His results showed that, while science educational videos made people feel more confident about a particular subject, viewers didn’t actually learn anything from them. Undeterred, he decided to keep producing content and now has over 10 million subscribers.
My neighbor’s shoe twitches back and forth as he inhales fumes from the can. A bass line purrs from his trunk speakers. The man in the green coat screams out again, leaning against the back window of a beat-up blue Ford Escape.
I think my neighbor is doing air duster before his shift at one of the stores in the strip mall. Maybe the Famous Footwear or the Goodwill. It reminds me of an experiment with mice and cocaine I’ve read about—how scientists studying addiction had rigged two enclosures, one that was bare, with just a cage, and another that had plants and more space for the mice. In both enclosures there was a cocaine drip, but, for the most part, the mice who abused it and OD’d were the ones in the cage. The ones in the lush green enclosure just did their coke recreationally.
My whole life, I’ve had a lot of angst about this question, one that you’ve probably struggled with too. How can I make a living and think freely at the same time? How can I break out of this trap—without becoming twisted in the process? And whenever I fail to come up with an answer, I get hopeless. I make a rut for myself and lie down in it with a bag of chips. Eating thoughtlessly. Watching whatever’s put in front of me. Indulging in the infinite menu of numbing agents that now serve as the backbone of our economy.
I don’t think a Little Caesars could survive in Cherry Creek. In working class areas, the fast food chains dominate. Lower-income people are also more likely to binge-watch reality TV, and television in general. And when it comes to the drugs that aren’t legal, of course, they’re more often abused by the poor and desperate. What starts as a way to unwind and relieve pressure becomes another bad habit, exerting further downward pressure on your mind and, by extension, your status.
Since I started the magazine, I’ve been getting dumber, no question. I’ve been doing drugs. Legal ones, sure, but definitely drugs. For instance, we’ve become proficient at crafting audio-visual stimuli that are irresistible, addictive. I don’t understand the science behind it, but there’s certainly something at play in this concept the kids have dubbed “brain rot”—with brain rot videos being the visual equivalent of ear worms (i.e., once you watch one, it’s hard to stop thinking about it, no matter how stupid it is). We just have an inexplicable attraction to these things. Recently, I showed one of the most notorious clips to a videographer friend of mine. I thought he would just be puzzled by it, and, honestly, I felt embarrassed to reveal I even knew about this content. Instead, here was this 45-year-old husband, father, and established film professional watching Skibidi Toilet and saying, “Hmm. There’s definitely an intelligence here. There’s actually a lot happening. The way the camera’s moving, the way the sound design works. A lot to unpack here. They know what they’re doing.”
He’s right, of course. They do know what they’re doing, and the beauty of our market is that, very often we don’t, which is why we buy in. I guess I’m at least a little aware of this whole thing, which is why I’m griping about it. But this business of mine is a big gambit. Right now, I’m worn down, in brain jail. And, like a lot of people, I’m working really hard in the hopes that I will set myself free and go to Big Rock Candy Mountain. That rarely happens of course. “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” And if I need a reminder of how much worse life could be, I need only look at that shoe wagging in the window of my neighbor’s car, or even at the ones I’m about to buy. Yes, I’m very lucky, very very lucky, and oh look, there’s a BOGO sale.
by Paul M. French
Paul M. French is the founder and editor of Denverse Magazine.
