Sirenita

Terri and I were in line buying groceries the other day, waiting behind a shopper who was probably more certain than us of being able to pay for the groceries they had on the belt. Looking at the glossy spreads of fantasy kitchens and celebrities, we realized we needed to start a magazine targeting a growing, untapped demographic: the unemployed.

Since all lifestyle magazines are aspirational in nature, we decided the magazine would be a lot like Woman’s World. Terri explained to me that every Woman’s World cover features a diet and a cake. The diet is usually a line about pounds lost, illustrated by a photo of a plain (but-makeover-made-up) woman whose slenderness demonstrates her new found self control and empowerment. The cake is shown in an inset photo, looking shellacked, with several General Foods product placements implanted in the thick frosting. The cakes are colorful and unappetizing, featuring pinwheels of circus peanuts, or Twinkies set on end in a miniature scale replica of stonehenge (”it’s edu-cake-tional!”).

Since nobody wants to be unemployed and broke, the magazine would deal in large part with how to find a job: how to look for (and get!) the jobs nobody wants, how to blend in with the migrant laborers on the street corner if you’re white, etc. The other half of the magazine would be the cake: making tea-cozies for your remote controls, optimizing your TiVo settings so you can catch the entire Babylon 5 marathon, how to avoid speaking with anyone for a week (or more!).

Lastly, there would be the kind of patently insane advice articles that can only be presented with rictus-smiling optimism, articles about how not to get sick, or how to declare bankruptcy when you have no health care and you get leukemia from your part-time reactor containment vessel cleanup job.

We could call it “Slack”, “Grift”, or “Dole”. Or what about “Loser”?