LIFE AND DEATH: THE NEW UNDERARM DEODERANT

The ruler I found lying around the large white plastic desk at work has Joy emblazoned across the side. The whiteboard marker I use to erase my messy scrawl is Valiant, or so it says. Inanimate objects have been christened harbingers of the finest human emotions, apparently.

I mean, c'mon. Who's kidding who here, right?

We're talking rulers. We're talking whiteboard erasers. If these puny, functional objects wield the greatest sensations known to man, then what hope is there for us, the rest of us, the human ones I mean?

It reminds me of a Jerry Seinfeld appearance on the Regis Philibin show a few years back. He was riffing as only Seinfeld can, talking about how he was eating LIFE cereal a few days back, wondering who the genius advertising execs were who named this particular product.

"I don't know," Seinfeld said. "If it were me, I would have called them 'Wheateos', or 'Toast-eos'. But somebody sat in a meeting and actually said: "No, this is bigger than that. This is life."

(It's, um, probably funnier when he does it. I swear.)

What's next, is what I'm asking. Pencils marked Ecstasy? Staples labeled Orgasmic? I can see it coming. (No, uh, pun intended.)

Everything has to be happy and bright and shiny and heroic. Things can't be just what they are, otherwise life would be revealed to be, well, mundane. Even difficult.

If we feel the need, as a species, to label office stationery with such superlative endorsements, life itself seems to become cheap and trival and somehow tainted.

In my opinion, anyway. It's all irrelevant anyway, I guess. Excuse me, but I've got to go eat a chocolate bar, Mars, named after a massive planet, a wonder of the universe. And read a magazine, Time, named after the unstoppable hunter that hunts us all. While slapping on a cologne, Eternity, a notion encompassing all the past and the future, but designed essentially for the purpose of making me stink less.