The Way We Live Now: Not fucking around, that's for sure. Would you be fucking around, in this day and age, when neither soothing twopenny candies nor free alcohol can calm the bloody Central Park Balloon Vendor Wars?

Sellers of all types of shit used to claim their products were "Redefining Luxury." Implied: "Redefining Luxury Upwards." Now, we redefine luxury to mean "Items other than bread and water."

Like chocolate. Not an entire chocolate bar; just a few "pea-sized chocolate balls," costing four cents. This is luxury, in India, where workers would be thrilled to enjoy a few of these pea-sized Cadbury confections, had they not been recently laid off from the Cadbury factory.

In New York, our standards of luxury are higher. Free drinks! Even rich people will do anything for free drinks, scientists have proven. And bars in New York have gotten so desperate that they are indeed offering free drinks for an hour a day, just to bring in some customers who might get drunk enough to later purchase a drink. This could work, except that most citizens—unable to purchase chocolate for sustenance—are too weak to make their way "out on the town," and too broke to hire a porter to drag them there.

But, look: balloon vendors in Central Park are threatening to break each others' legs. Or maybe just giving away free balloons to undersell each other? Either way, we can agree that things have gone too far. This new world of luxury—with its chocolate peas and Everclear punch and balloon mafias—is really a new gilded cage of hell.

Except compared to that bloody Acapulco drug war. Then it's not so bad.
[Pic via]