the san francisco subway has been taken over by terrorists.

actually, its been taken over by advertisers, but i consider advertising a form of terrorism anyway, so it's all pretty much one in the same.

jory and i descended into the depths of the downtown bart station and were greeted with immense banner advertisements for purple cylindrical medication. each giant billboard pill, about the size of oral tranquilizers for godzilla, floated against a blue idyllic sky, as if the clouds had magically formed to create pleasant, candied, floating drugs. as far as we could tell, there was absolutely no explanation as to what these giant pills would do, just that they were a thing to be had. or rather, several of the same thing to be had over and over again.

i want the purple drug.

the surreal part of the purple drug was not that the advertising was lacking any form of actual information, but because this pharmaceutical company had bought out the entire subway system. as the train sped along to our destination, we saw that the monster purple capsules covered every single billboard at every station we passed. the odd factor increased tenfold because i had never seen any of these ads anywhere on the surface streets of san francisco - not on the freeway, not at bus stops, in magazines or even on the marketing devices previously known as taxis. it was as if i had suddenly stepped into a futuristic world where everything humans ingested now came in pill form. the purple pill for breakfast and the red pill for dessert. perhaps these ads were never seen on the surface because the target market for this medication was directed at the san francisco chapter of c.h.u.d.

would these pills make me happy beyond my wildest dreams? would they make me lose weight and be more popular? would they increase my libido to the point that i became a stark raving naked nymphomaniac roaming the subways for my next unsuspecting victim? regardless of how enjoyable any of these options may be, i remained clueless to their purpose because most of the billboards didn't include the name of the medication, much less any information on what the drug actually did. i just saw images of pleasant purple pills defying gravity against a picture perfect sky. one of the billboards showed the url for the drug emblazoned across several of the pills.

jory and i succumbed to the advertising onslaught and looked up the website when we got home. the curiousity was getting to me. those marketing people definitely had something figured out.

the mystical purple pill, the giant tranquilizers in the sky turned out to be nothing more exciting than prescription antacid medicine.

huh. maybe my c.h.u.d. theory wasn't as far off as i thought.

<9.20.00>

 

 

 

 

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