Candles Make You Kill Yourself One commercial makes it clear: Your life is totally vile. Also: Are can openers evil?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

It is 2007 and it is the age of iPod-enabled baby strollers and whales that speak in dialects and caffeinated bar soap and therefore clearly the absolute worst problem facing you in this amazing Bush-torn war-sucking environmentally nasty religiously indignant kaleidoscopic dog pound of a capricious clammy hell-bound world is this: You have terrifically boring candles.

It is so true, isn't it? Just look: There you sit, in your very own TV commercial, sighing heavily, the absolute epitome of the dejected and neglected housewife, what with your limp blouse and your bored expression and your utter lack of anything at all to think about because the kids are all zonked on Ritalin and your husband's staying "late" at the office again, which of course translates into getting completely drunk after work as he does every night so as to escape your brutal numbing sighs.

And so you stare, dully, disconsolately, at the three white pillar candles on the table, each lit up and actually rather pretty and yet somehow deathly, miserably tedious, so boring you want to slice out your eyeballs with a cheese grater. After all, they are all white. They are all the same size. They just sit there. Oh my God (you ask yourself), what is wrong with the world of candles? What is wrong with me?

Enter the soothing TV voice-over. It shares your pain. It knows the depths of your tormented soul. It says, with a bizarre sort of sympathetic narrator's dejection, "White candles can be so plain." Wow, does that disembodied voice know you, or what?

Thank God, the voice continues, for the Glade Corporation, galloping in on giant steeds of hope and modern synthetic fragrance technology, offering you not one, not two, but fully three silly little single-use scented oil candles of different colors all in one box (wow!), each of which melts down into an oily puddle of weird waxy goodness as soon as you light it and each of which smells like rancid Honeycomb cereal and each of which lights up your life like Jesus sucking a light bulb. Dazzling! Epiphanic! You are, at long last, saved.

This is indeed the commercial for Glade's TRIO candle pack, perhaps the skankiest and weirdest little ad running today insofar as it presumes you are not merely a lazy idiot housewife, and not merely a lazy idiot housewife who has never heard of candles in any other color but white, but you are a lazy idiot housewife whose life is so utterly overfed and glutted and spiritually vacuous that you have nothing better to do than sit and stare into the great numbing consumerist void that is your life, and sigh.

Then again, maybe they're onto something. Glade is, after all, a multimillion-dollar corporation that makes a simply huge array of rather inane synthetic products that do almost nothing and are insanely wasteful and silly and overpackaged and, with the tiniest amount of effort or knowledge, you could spend a fraction of what their gnarly products cost and instead buy real oils and real candles and actual natural scents -- but then again, how would you ever get to experience the freakish glory of, say, the Glade PlugIns Scented Oil Light Show, a combination air-poisoner/weird dime-store hallucinogen for the paint-huffing set?

Ah yes, Glade knows most consumers do not give a flying monkey's tail about, you know, actual thought. In fact, they count on it. Theirs is merely a Wal-Mart approved snapshot of living, reeking hell, a moment in all-American time where we get to step back and take the long view and go, Oh my freaking God, is there anything worse than having unscented candles of only one monochromatic color?

Wait, of course there is. Have you not seen the elderly woman just down the street? She has her own TV commercial, too. It often runs right alongside the one for the Glade TRIO of noxious artificial oily lumps that you don't really need and which require replacement in two hours and which smell like cat pee in a candy store.

Watch, won't you, as this horribly abused, world-weary woman struggles terrifically, violently with the single most horrible and antagonistic object in her entire life.

No, it is not her deadbeat husband. It is not her 18 mangy cats. It is not even her closetful of suicide-inducing plain white candles.

It is, of course, her can opener.

Observe, won't you, as this good but apparently completely baffled American woman tries to open a simple can of beans using one of those horrible manual can openers. It is ugly. It is violent and tense and borderline deadly. Her hands fumble, the can jerks and trembles and veritably explodes, liquid spills everywhere and beans go flying and the razor-sharp lid careens off and nearly blinds and impales and eviscerates her. What's more, her poor fingers are nearly crippled with the pain and effort it takes to turn the little knob thingy. Agony!

Thank God, then, for this electric hand-held $29 can opener from Whothehellcares, Inc. It is pure magic. It is salvation in a cheap Chinese-made hunk of instant landfill. This woman, too, is saved. She is happy again. She can return to her knitting and her cats and never again have to fret about her inability to open a can. So helpful! Especially with the Apocalypse, you know, just around the corner. See? These corporations, they really care.

Fast-forward roughly 1,000 years. Maybe 500. OK, 50. An advanced alien race arrives on Earth on a weekend jaunt to poke around the smoking rubble of our fair planet and explore the swell artifacts of our lost and long-dead "civilization" and maybe score a few shiny things for the mantle. Hey, it's a weekend.

And oh, what a treasure trove o' destruction it is. Ample evidence of brutal wars, religious fanaticism, incredible abuse of resources, of global warming and polluted oceans and a level of brutal pride and audacity and sheer unchecked ego, a photo of George Bush alongside a chimp, nearly identical. Aha, they say, no wonder they couldn't last.

But then they look a bit closer. They just so happen to find some dusty old YouTube clips of these exact two commercials flickering on an old PC (hey, it could happen). They note, in bemused disbelief, how far the world's most "advanced" culture had fallen, into what dank holes of waste and deadness and palpable karmic pain.

Now it all comes clear. It wasn't the wars or the terrorists or the nukes or even global warming, after all. It was this. This attitude, this numbness, this sad and exhausted approach to the world, where God is reduced to a Glade Scented Oil TRIO and humans are merely a vain, dull housewife, staring numbly into the void. This, truly, is the death of worlds. And it smells like sugar-coated cat pee.