The Twin Towers of Uline

For months, there was a strikingly ugly painting leaned against the wall under the time clock at my work. Or, not really a painting, but one of those canvases that someone paid to have a pixilated jpeg printed on and stapled to a stretcher bar. I honestly couldn't figure out what it was. Is it supposed to be a view of downtown from a fancy house in the West Hills, the city about to be consumed by God's fiery wrath like Sodom?

Parts look AI generated, in an early DeepDream way, but the rest looks like a bad Photoshop edit. Regardless, I have no idea why someone would print this image on a canvas and abandon it in the back of a pizza parlor. One day, I got tired of stepping around it and bungee corded it to my bike as I was clocking out. No one has mentioned its absence since the heist.

My original plan was to paint over the canvas, but I found that, in addition to being quite ugly, it was also extremely thin and low quality. I decided it would be better to repurpose its ugliness as a collage base. I discovered that the color scheme beautifully matched a Uline catalog I'd just taken home.

Pretty much every kitchen and factory I've ever worked at subscribes to the Uline catalog. It is almost 1000 pages long, printed in full color, and invariably goes straight into the recycling. The entire operation seems sinister and absurdly inefficient. According to Wikipedia, Uline's CEO will sometimes print her far-right political musings in the catalog. I was disappointed to find no deranged manifestos in my copy, but it did have thousands of images of every conceivable mass-produced plastic item. I especially liked the pictures of objects being asphyxiated in polypropylene bags. The material gives the items a soft, ethereal glow, like a silent film actress photographed through silk.

Who took these photos? Are they from the early 90s, or last week? Who are these freaks grinning in hazmat suits? Are they professional models or random Uline employees, pulled from their desks mid-shift against their will? Who died manufacturing the garbage in this hellishly absurd supply chain? What were they paid? Why does any of this need to exist?

Written July 2026, edited Sept 2026.