These boots are NOT made for walking.

I take advertising very personally.

Sometimes I take it so personally that I stay up late and write threatening letters to the GEICO Gecko and the Energizer Bunny. Some nights they write back.

The doctors tell me this is just a paranoid delusion, but of course, they're all out to get me.

Advertisers claim to have a certain degree of insight about how the buying public thinks and feels. They think they know me.

So when I see advertising that just completely rubs me the wrong way, I have to conclude that whoever was behind it has grossly misjudged me. It's like slander. I feel like that billboard is talking shit about me. Not in the paranoid way this time.

The worst offender is ALDO shoes. Their ads are pasted all over BART stations (already terrifying locales as it is), and if their goal is to make me feel mildly ill for reasons I'm almost scared to consider in any depth, then they've done a masterful job.

I see this one a lot:

That's it. That's the whole thing. I didn't crop or alter it at all. That's the free-standing, intact image as it is seen on the subway wall. It doesn't even have the company name on it, so I suppose I'm almost guessing that it's an ALDO, but really, it could scarcely be anything else.

What are we looking at? Plainly, it is a young woman who has been crushed by a giant beach ball. I have no idea if she's survived the trauma, but I don't doubt that she'll need immediate and extensive medical attention just as soon as that thing rolls off of her.

Does this image make you want to buy something? It sure does me. I really want to buy a giant beach ball for crushing people with. Because I think we've all needed someone crushed from time to time. But ALDO does not sell giant crushing beach balls. I checked. Extensively. The sales staff have filed several injunctions against me.

In any case, not really feeling the shoes, so let's move on.

What in the-? Um, okay?

What do you think of when you see this? Me, I think of sushi. And then I think of sex. And I'm not at all comfortable with the proximity of those two subjects. Those are separate wants, and they should remain separate, and I don't appreciate the way this ad is...confusing me.

And now I'm thinking about that story about Led Zeppelin and the red snapper. And I do NOT want to think about Led Zeppelin and the red snapper. But you know what I'm not thinking about? Shoes! Never crossed my mind.

We've got one last item, hopefully it'll be something less unsettling, and perhaps even related to the product in a understandable way.

Oh sweet leaping Jesus on a lily pad, what is going on here? Save me David Lynch, save me from the nightmare. I'm sorry about what I said about your movies. I had not yet known true horror.

What are these people doing? And why? And what bizarre fetish site was this image originally commissioned for, and what dark deeds had to be committed to convince ALDO to take it off their hands and perpetrate it on the public?

I feel violated. I feel like I should have to use a doll to show the policeman where ALDO improperly touched my mind.

I suppose the fact that I am talking about the ads and have now showcased them to an audience that might otherwise never have been tormented by such unspeakable nether-regions of commercialism means that the ad campaign was effective. If you asked them, they would probably say that I had played right into their hands.

And then you would say: "What's that? Can't hear you with that mackerel head on."