Ticket No. 65

Capitalism got the best of me. 

I stand in line to draw a number—not to receive but to give. To give of my time, my patience, my money and my joy. While I should be exploring the scars and dimples of Tōkyō, 

I become complicit in exploitation, counting the changing lines that contour my forehead and my anger. But what is this anger if it cannot redirect me, cannot recode me?

With too many system outages, I acknowledge my ticket and the number on it. It dictates and frames my life until I return to redeem it—to consume. As if scheduled consumption was not enough, I chose to bridge the free time (that is not even free) by consuming. 

I have not even finished my spontaneous consumption, when the main dish announces itself. I rush through the streets of Ginza to redeem the ticket. Hello, we are three people and ticket no. 65. As I enter, I see numbers 66 and 67 already in the store—how is that possible, I wonder. I thought there was a system. 

But the system collapses the moment ticket number 2 enters the store. Because now ticket numbers 1 and 2 are competing for the goods. And in this free market of capitalism, it does not matter who ticket 1 and 2 are. What matters is that ticket number 2 feels threatened by ticket number 1, 3, 4 and so on—enough to settle for a shoe that ticket number 2 didn’t want. But if ticket 2 is fast enough, then winning could still be in sight. 

I zoom back into the lunatic reality that I have found myself in. Ticket number 67 has found shoes and is ready to tap that evil phone on the card reader. Meanwhile ticket number 65—I mean my sisters and I—have become witnesses, byproducts and part of a disgusting scene of consumerism. 

Consumerism with its multiple personalities has robbed us of ours. We stand there like deserted shells in human shapes. Computing, but the CPU is overheating in the air-conditioned Ginza boutique. 

It wasn’t the Onitsuka Tiger that devoured me, but capitalism.