My house is full of catalogs. My wife gets three or four a day, every day, in the mail. Mostly she tosses them out, but the ones she likes to look at again and again she keeps, and they just keep piling and piling and piling. Some days when I'm bored, I like to look at them. But mostly I'm tired of catalogs. I'm tired of being sold lifestyles in the guise of products, different lifestyles in every catalog, an array of bright new whiz bang upscale, downscale, peasant scale, simplified, complicated, sexualized, neutered, globe-trotting, comfort nesting, exercising, constant eating lifestyles.

It's the teen furniture catalogs that really get me. There's something very cynical about the whole design. It's not like the giant megacorporation that runs the catalog company is run by teenagers. They probably aren't even any teenagers working on the catalog, except in focus groups. But there's all this hip, rad, sixties, language with cute spellings and twisted grammar and weird camera angles, and little web-like pointers and stick on notes and arrows and help buttons drawn on the pictures with helpful little hints about how you can be an athlete, or a media maven, or a chat-on-the-phone-all-day cute little piece of ass with your very own half-naked, long-blond-haired, broad-chested surfer dude lounging in the corner of your room on his very own personalized bean bag chair.

Which is, of course, the reason the teen furniture catalogs keep piling up even though they're stupid as hell and we don't have any teenagers. I know my wife. I know what she likes and I know what she wants, and she may not think I know, or maybe she just likes denying the obvious, but I bet dollars to doughnuts that every one of the three days a week she's home alone she's spending a couple of hours completely naked in bed with her legs spread wide and her hand on her clit and the other hand holding the catalog open to the pages with the half-naked young men, imagining them not in their very own personalized bean bag chairs but right there in the bed on top of her fucking the hell out of her, and thanking through gritted teeth and the rush of orgasm the giant megacorporation that sends her soft-core teen porn every month for free.