Too Much Ass-wipe Really Picks My Butt

About two weeks ago I was on my way to work, about to get on the SkyTrain when I was ambushed by an aproned woman throwing a thin newspaper in my face.

"It's NEW! It's FREE!"

New and free are the greatest of all consumer-culture mantras. Naturally I took one... although I expected to be immediately assaulted from the page by some sort of political or religious agenda.

I admit that I have yet to grok any specific agenda from those pages, but I can't say I was looking - it simply wasn't immediately apparent.

I tried to read some of the dozen or so pages on my way to work. Not so easy. I'm only two stops (albeit two fairly long stops) from work. It doesn't take five minutes total, and a significant amount of that is taken up with negotiating the arrival and egress of passengers at the one interim stop.

Over the next two days I noticed though that the articles were largely devoid of any substance that wasn't already apparent from the headlines.

"Metro" was pretty light-weight, when it came to a newspaper.

On day four, in addition to the woman handing out papers at my local stop, there was a man handing out "New" "Free" papers at the stop next to my office. Not the same paper. This one was called "24 Hours" - and I immediately noticed billboards all over publicizing it. It was glossy and full colour and more like a comic-book in it's design... and the content was as vapid as Metro.

On the weekend, a whole new set of boxes appeared beside the weekly free news boxes... "Dose." More of the same.

By the time I went back to work, I had decided that none of these papers had anything of value to offer me. I didn't care if they were "New" or "Free" - they were "Pointless."

But by the time I was on the train platform it was covered with discarded papers... apparently many more people thought that it was pointless. The waste... fucking pisses me off.

They're still flogging the damned things at the SkyTrain, but less people are taking them. I pray the trend continues and they all go out of business... or at least two of them. Or maybe they can just print the headlines and save paper... it wouldn't change the quality of news they're disseminating.