#502 Nickel a Nick

One of the coolest things about getting older is you begin to get that feeling of having been here before. “What goes around comes around,” that old phrase your grandparents used to trot out whenever you put on fashionable bold-colored Converse hightops, now seems to mean something entirely different. A lot more real than it did when the gramps were laughing through their gums. Sometimes things change but the position they occupy in our lives doesn’t. Like in relationships¾there always has to be one of the partners who’s more anal retentive than the other. Every set of roommates has an Oscar and a Felix. Two Feli can not survive. Clean that squeaky would suck all the oxygen out of air.
So it is with something I call analogous increments. Analogous increments are what salesmen use to persuade you to buy something now. And you ought to buy it now because it’s not that expensive. It used to be: “Why this baby cost less than a pack of cigarettes a day. That’s only 720 dollars a year.” The power of analogy is used to break down your defenses and point out that you are already spending that much of your budget on something that is relatively useless in the larger scheme of things. So why not buy the new relatively useless thing you’re being offered? You convince yourself you will give up the cigarettes and buy the big TV. But you don’t—you end up with both. And when the new credit card comes around to help you float your debt and it offers you free miles on a vacation you can’t afford either, you snatch it up. The new analogous increment of the early 21st Century is the fancy coffee drink. “Why, for the price of 2 lattes a day you could be driving this brand new Hyundai.” Cool. I suppose its fitting coffee replaced cigarettes as an analogous increment of value. It replaced them as an increment of addiction as well. I heard this guy at the club the other day, “Yeah, between coffee and steroids I was getting a little testy, so I had to cut back to one macchiato a day…”
America, ya gotta love it