TANS 

Tans need human skin to exist (see the chapter on parasitical keyholes) just like melanoma, eczema, and boils. The difference is, most of the time, tans are desirable.

Tans hate people who wake up after sunset, such as cabaret entertainers and jazz players. They hate intellectuals, too.

They love body builders and rich girls

They hate New York, they love Cannes.

They hate beach umbrellas, hats, awnings, roofs. They love endless deserts.

They hate 15 SPF sunscreen. They hate 30 SPF more.

They hate the color white. They love all shades of red.

They hate nordic countries, but they love the concept of a midnight sun.

They hate the poles. They love the tropics.

Rooftops, yes. Basements, no.

No caves, no mines, no tunnels, no movie theaters.

The sun will last for at least another 5 billion years. Sadly, it seems that people and their tans won’t.

BAG LADIES’ BAGS 

Some of us have things written on our foreheads, figuratively speaking. Plastic bags have them for real. However, they don’t choose or mean what those words say. Thanks For Shopping With Us is something they’d never come up with.

Sometimes bags are tied into knots by people with idle minds, which makes them really mad and useless. Sometimes, when left alone, the wind will help them take flight and move away really fast. Is a good blast of air what they’re waiting for when we see them loitering and littering the sidewalk?

Sometimes they’re overfilled; plastic bags cannot control what is put into them, so they often stretch and weaken in places, forming streaks, like pregnant bellies.

Thanks to the dependence bag ladies have on plastic bags to keep their belongings dry and safe, used plastic bags can get conceited to the point of becoming delusional. They’ve been known to humiliate paper bags publicly, and even burden themselves with impossibly ambitious endeavors.

ART FRAMES 

As it hears the museum doors lock for the day, the elaborate hand carved wooden frame starts laughing wildly at the childish Miró composition inside it, a nightly ritual of humiliation.

The minimalistic black frame, chosen for its neutrality, bends and twists to expel its baroque contents.

The antique gilded frame conspires to outshine the Klimt painting and its wealth of gold leaf.

Wherever they are, whoever they belong to, frames cannot help competing with what they frame.

BALLPOINT PENS 

Their tips were solid gold and their bodies were covered in fine Chinese lacquer, or sculpted with pure silver. Often, they were inlaid with mother-of-pearl and precious gems.

Such were pens. Owned by rich landowners and industrialists, used by presidents to sign laws that changed history, and by powerful businessmen to close multimillion-dollar deals.

That is, until the ballpoint was invented and pens finally became accessible for the masses. You could see them everywhere: behind the ears of bakers, in the shirt pockets of accountants and waiters, tucked into the overalls of factory workers and mechanics, inside the toolboxes of plumbers and carpenters, next to cheap drugstore makeup in middle class women’s purses.

Unlike pencils — popular from the start and happy about it — ballpoints suffered the same faith of all shoddy versions of luxury items.

As the years passed, the humiliation only got worse; ballpoints became something that people didn’t mind losing, or getting back after lending them out.

You know you’ve reached rock bottom when you’re abandoned in offices and libraries, and nobody even bothers to steal you.