Room with Blue Bedspreads

This is not La Betty’s bedroom. This room is remarkable in ways that La Betty does not appreciate. In spite of Crayola blue and the depth of reminiscence blue evokes, La Betty would be utterly unmoved by the simplicity of this place. La Betty would cringe at the bedspreads. Their blue is naked; its absence of ornamentation betrays frugality, a stance La Betty cannot bear.

Although La Betty wouldn’t deign to enter this room, if she did she would cringe at the outdated television across from one of the beds. She would turn her back to it immediately. To La Betty a TV absolutely must be a 4K Ultra HD portal into the universe of fashion. Fashionable images are always active, shimmering and sumptuous. Fashion never sleeps.

La Betty would never step into this room. Seemingly different from her condo, this room no doubt harbours a potential threat, or, as La Betty would describe it, “a perverse interruption.” Perverse interruptions have disturbed La Betty too often. La Betty won’t go anywhere and risk a perverse interruption. So she won’t go anywhere.

These so-called perverse interruptions emanate from very suspect sources. They are shape shifters. They are spectral enticements that perpetrate every possible inducement for La Betty to change her allegiance from consuming to participation.

La Betty has stabilized her lifestyle. Her condo is ten times the size of this blue-centered room. La Betty has quarantined herself voluntarily, to protect her pure devotion to shopping. The less La Betty’s lifestyle changes the more secure she feels. La Betty has seen how often, beneath the surface of ordinary rooms, festering in the shadows, are the insubordinate entities, phantoms of the twentieth century, resentful spirits that do whatever they can to lure La Betty away from her life of shopping.

Undoubtedly such entities are in this Spartan room, probably hiding on – or in – the television screen. The trembling picture on the TV would probably be a Phil Donohue rerun. At an unforeseen moment, however, the program will be interrupted due to “technical difficulties.” Then iconic TV “snow” will fill the screen. But this time the snow looks like a swarm of bees. The snow leaves the screen because it actually is a swarm of bees. The TV goes black and the swarm roars. The swarm spreads out like an overcast sky hovering just above the curtain rods. The layer of bees slowly descends. Finally the crowd is so thick it covers the blue beds with buzzing and shivering insects.

Then a single bee emerges from a swaying curtain. The bee enlarges. As it enlarges it is no longer a bee. It is an elongated moss-green four-footed reptile with the massive pink face of an unaccountably familiar infant. The baby opens its mouth and its nostrils close down like a crocodile’s going under water. The baby’s eyes bulge as it prepares to speak, although there is no person in the room to listen.

Early in the movement it was the same. No one to listen. But as soon as one Pariah listened it was as if one spark ignited a pyre. The corpse of colonialism was burnt to ashes.

What a coincidence. This is exactly what La Betty does not want to ever happen to consumerism. La Betty hasn’t thought it through but this is her unique and wordless dread: What if La Betty herself is beguiled into releasing a spark that burns materialism to ashes? What if La Betty unwittingly starts the conflagration that consumes consumerism? The only way to avert this calamity, or so La Betty thought, was to confine herself to her condo. She had assumed that when you are always shopping condo life would feel like ultra comfort, not captivity. La Betty was certain she could fortify herself with divine purchases. She would be perfectly harmless surrounded by a force field of mass media. La Betty would never have predicted her eventual claustrophobia, nor could she have foretold endless spiritual combat.

La Betty’s materialism transcends the needs and predicaments of humankind. To La Betty materialism is a calling. Only the elite graced with perfect nonchalance can practice true consumerism. La Betty quoted the new Shakespeare,

All the world’s a shop; And we are but customers in it. We have our entrances and exits; The best of us have many styles and money enough to obey our fancies. La Betty fancied herself an icon of the consummate shopper. La Betty had been sanctified by the Truth: superficiality is ecstasy.