Is your shampoo angling to make partner at the firm ahead of you?
Is your wall-to-wall carpet convincing your friends to betray you to the secret police in exchange for special access to foreign-made luxury goods?
Are your Brook Brothers shirts plotting to set your house on fire for the insurance money?
Is your cologne making fun of you behind your back?
Is your alarm clock quietly whispering political unorthodoxies and counter-revolutionary canards while you sleep, thus hypnopædically indoctrinating you?
Are your electrical outlets deliberately letting electricity leak out and collect in a pool on the floor where you might step in it, or were those events accidental as they claim?
Do those magazine subscription renewal forms that slip from your copy of Martha Stewart Living truly have your best interests at heart when they warn you that your atlas is altering the roads, borders, and geographical features of its maps so they no longer correspond to the real world, or are they playing their own game?
Why does your sniper rifle want to assassinate all those CEOs anyway? What did they ever do to it?
Is your shaving cream really a mystagogue of Gnosticism, an enlightened one in an ancient tradition of secret knowledge?
Is it true, or simply your Big Mac’s paranoid delusion, that everyone around you has been replaced with robots who are absolutely indistinguishable from their originals, and that everything you see and hear is a kind of elaborate stage play for an audience of one—namely, you?
Is your toothpaste in love with your mother?
Why is it that, every time you watch a movie, a character from some other movie inexplicably shows up? Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink from Reservoir Dogs should not be in Terms of Endearment. What is your television trying to say with these intrusions?
Is your ballpoint pen secretly a deviationist clique reactionary intent on sabotaging the will of the masses with bourgeois ideas and preserving the Four Olds (old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas)?
Is your Ikea Förnuft 20-piece cutlery set secretly a Kardashian?
Are your Tylenol Gel-Caps in over their heads with loan sharks?
Are your silver cufflinks right when they warn that an elite of liberal secular humanists is planning to ban guns and overthrow the Constitution and establish a totalitarian globalist government, or it is your Cuisinart DCC-2000 12-Cup Brewmaster with Self-Cleaning that is correct when it postulates that it is a genetically engineered transhuman caste, in conjunction with extraterrestrials from their base inside the Hollow Earth, that is in fact poised to institute a New World Order? And should your silver cufflinks’ rabid anti-Semitism mean you should leave them at home for the upcoming B’nai B’rith fund-raising dinner, or is your monogrammed titanium cufflinks’ insistence on constantly lecturing everyone about the gold standard more gauche?
Are you really you? Or is “you” merely a place-holder for a complex confluence of genetics and environment? Or has “you” been replaced with one of the robots that are perfect simulacra for their originals?