Atticus   

As I was reading an online recap from an Alabama paper about my nephew’s baseball team on Monday, I noticed the preceding ad on the same page. (This is actually a screenshot of the final frame of the ad’s animation.)

Most of my friends know I love good advertising. I study and admire the craftsmanship in this sister industry like Bo Jackson appreciated Charles Barkley’s skill on the hardwoods. I even got my friend Scott, an insanely successful painter all of 37 years old, to begrudgingly admit that it makes sense for a capitalist country’s best art to come forth from work hocking products.

Still, I feel like I’m channeling Douglas Coupland any time I see an ad like this one. “Nauseated” is a little strong for describing the emotion it evokes. But it’s close.

An attorney who’s just made partner in Birmingham stumbles across it, phones his wife and two weekends later finds himself touring the grounds of the development with Chad, the lead sales agent.

Then he signs the papers, moves in the white sofa, the Pottery Barn quilt and the clear lamp with the shells in the base. Yet, after only three days, he discovers that it didn’t cause (1) Megan to transform from a goth to a cheerleader who wears an actual swimsuit to the beach, (2) Hunter to receive an epiphany that rejecting a full scholarship to UVa to attend the local community college because he’s in love with a 16-year-old is a shortsighted decision and (3) the memory of Jenn’s affair six years ago with Hunter’s former Little League coach to somehow drift from shore with the ebbing tide.

A second home isn’t what these folks are promoting. They’re selling an escape from your current life, as Coupland’s character Roger contends we all wish we could do—even “Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cast members of Rent, Vaclav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus”—in the opening of The Gum Thief.

That’s why I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t sometimes appeal to me too, these images somehow conjuring up a version of me who’s financially independent rather than in debt because of a house that’s sat empty in Atlanta for eight months; blissfully married rather than chronically single; and building sand castles and other seaside memories with a couple of well-adjusted offspring rather than childless at 38.

And that’s what, ultimately, makes it good (albeit skin-crawl-inducing) advertising.

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Side note: I just discovered Coupland’s old blog on nytimes.com. If you’ve never read any of his work, it’s a good start.