just eat it

catering to the masses...

as a former caterer, to me that means taking all the lids off the buffet line, making sure there are enough spoons in all the right places, and telling everyone who comes back for seconds to please take a new plate, please, really, we wash billions of them anyway, it's okay.

the masses are not your average dinner party though. a lot of them think crab-stuffed pastry hors-d'oeuvres are actually really gross. and those brie puff balls too.

there is no way to describe the masses other than 'the masses'. is there? they are huge. they are disparate. they are out there. they are weird.

some of them really love crab-stuffed pastries. that's why crab-stuffed pastries exist. somebody has to like them.

that relationship is totally... self-contained. are all markets like that? I mean, sure, once upon a time, some chef invented crab-stuffed pastries for the very first time, and until then of course there was no market for them. nobody liked or disliked them. but the minute they're invented, the minute they show up on the shiny silver platter you're carrying around for all the rich snobs at the president's inaugural wine and cheese fiasco, then they exist in a market. the chef says, okay, put these on the menu. and the rich snobs buy them. they exist: supply. they are eaten: demand.

if nobody ate the things, chefs would quit making them.

if the chefs didn't make them... well, nobody could eat them, could they?

do we eat them because they just happen to be sitting on that shiny silver platter, going a bit stale an hour after the wine and cheese fiasco? I do. that's the way I eat. it's sitting in front of me: supply. I might as well eat it: demand.

I guess markets are kind of big generalizations about the relationship between chefs and their little pastry inventions, between me and my lonely leftover hors-d'oeuvres.

one brilliant idea, bam, whether it be a new kind of pastry or the latest greatest t-shirt design, it explodes into existence and then people eat it. or they don't. self-contained. are all markets like that?

it reminds me greatly of that enigmatic event scientists call the big bang.

nothing... nothing... and then all of a sudden, everything. but where's the supply and demand there? I hope there aren't monsters out there chewing on our universe.

if there are, they're probably us.

the universe as market? a giant, unfathomable market where supply and demand are called evolution and natural selection.

weird.

I need to think this through a lot more than I have.