SkyMall catalog: Admit it — you’re fascinated too

I wish I could say I spent my week off sunning on an exotic beach, sipping mango margaritas.

Instead, I acquired my vacation tan sitting in a deck chair on my front lawn, sipping lemonade and tending a pair of shelter puppies that my family agreed to foster.

Stocked with tennis balls for them and magazines for me, I spent hours each day watching them play. When I tired of reading about 15 ways to clear clutter or cook chicken or tone thighs, I reached for an old SkyMall catalog. It was the closest I would come to traveling this summer.

If you’ve ever flown, you’ve probably thumbed through the catalog. SkyMall is the air travel equivalent of the Gideon Bible in the hotel nightstand.

Airlines might be stinting on pillows and charging for blankets, but pull open the seat pocket in front of you and you’ll still find a SkyMall magazine next to the airsickness bag. Its cover offer — Free Copy. Take It. We’ll Replace It! — always seems to me like a tiny recompense for the $8 the airlines now charge for a sandwich.

Twenty million of the magazines are printed annually, and more than 600 million airline passengers each year are said to flip its pages at some point during their flights. The latest edition ran 147 pages, with thousands of items and hundreds of retailers, from big names like Brookstone to anonymous basement inventors.

The catalog’s sweep makes it easy to mock. But it is plugged in to the traveler’s psyche so well that even in a down economy, SkyMall sales are rising.

Guilty about leaving the kids behind? Surprise them with “The World’s Largest Write-On Map Mural” ($149.95) so they can track your travels while you’re away.

If your stay-behind spouse needs spying on, “The World’s Smallest Camcorder” ($99.95) is the size of a stick of gum. “What happens while you’re away?” asks the ad for the Agent Cam Video Spy Camera. “Conceal one behind a picture, and see what you couldn’t see before.”

If you’re worried that Fido is missing you, you can choose between the plush orthopedic Comfy Pet Couch ($129.95) and a set of tiny carpeted stairs ($199.95) so your dog can climb into your empty bed.

And SkyMall covers the traveling salesman from every angle. There’s the “Nano-UV Disinfection Scanner” ($59.99) to kill fleas and lice in hotel beds, the “Gravity Defyer” line of footwear ($129.95), and remedies for thinning hair from the high-tech “X5 Hair Laser” device ($299) to the low-brow can of “Toppix” fibers ($21.95) that bond to thinning strands.

On the airplane, I tend to leaf through quickly, lest my seatmate think I’m the kind of rube gullible enough to believe “your troubles will melt away” with the $49.95 “Head Spa Massager.”

But studying the magazine alone in my yard, I found plenty of SkyMall items I could see myself buying.

Like the $199.99 Electronic Feng Shui Compass that “calculates supportive energy fields quickly and easily to align your physical surroundings to help manifest your goals and intentions.” And the Edge Baking Pan ($39.95), which promises brownies with toasty edges and soft, moist centers.

There was something comforting about the sense that so many strangers out there share my ailments and eccentricities. I discovered items that I would be embarrassed to admit ordering and am slightly ashamed even to want.

Like the “Ultrasonic Barking Dog Deterrent” ($69.95). Disguised as a birdhouse, hung on a tree limb, it emits an unpleasant sound that humans can’t hear but that will “startle” a barking dog into silence. So I could torture my neighbor’s yappy Chihuahua without its owner fingering me — just a bird lover! — as the culprit.

For me, leafing through the catalog is thus both a bonding experience and a peek behind the scenes at a world I’d never ordinarily see. No one I know would spend $995 for Mombasa, an “eight-foot-tall designer resin giraffe” for the garden, or spring for an $850 life-size replica sarcophagus of King Tutankhamen, with 14 storage shelves inside.

I understand the medical stuff, the bunion regulator and shoulder wrap and arthritis gloves. But what’s with all the stealth and secrecy — the hidden cameras in sunglasses and tape recorders embedded in writing pens?

Which brings us to the question: What does all this say about us?

The shrinks and economists have their answers: The dozens of watches reflect our sense of impending mortality; the safety gadgets tap into our fear of flying; the garden gnomes unleash our need for escape and fantasy. And our fascination with the lot of it is evidence of rampant, heedless consumerism.

I don’t think it’s that complicated. Sometimes you just really need a perfect brownie pan.

Or a way to figure out the ancestry of a pair of shelter mutts. Because I think I’m falling in love with the puppies cavorting on my lawn, and $59.95 for a Canine Genealogy Kit suddenly doesn’t seem so dumb.

sandy.banks@latimes.com