Sometimes, the answer hits you
harder than Candy Johnson shimmying to Little Stevie Wonder and
you realize the way we can all just get along. You know that
little thing called cool? Yeah, that thing that makes little
girls smoke, pierce everything, and wear dreadful bell bottoms?
Drop it, it's sucking the life out of us.
Let's face it, cool is an elusive mistress for most of us.
One hundred percent of Americans feel they are cool, but only
one percent are. That one percent cavorts with cool, beds her,
and coldly leaves her lying there in the dark. The rest of us
watch cool with waggling tongues and spread rumors about what
we'd like other people to believe we've done with cool, but,
of course, never did.
The basic truth of cool is that cool is the unattainable minority
so many of us strive to be like. The reality of that truth is
that the minority seldom know or care that they are in that minority.
They're cool. We self-conscious copycats, by that very definition,
are the furthest thing from cool. Besides, everybody can't be
cool, because everybody can't be in a minority.
So give it up! Drop cool or be doomed!!!
We in that ninety-nine percent are wasting energy by striving
for something we cannot attain. It's an impossible task we burden
ourselves with. We in the ninety-nine percent have as much a
chance of being revealed as The Son Of God as we do of entering
the one percentile! Even so, we trudge on with our pursuit and
even use it to size each other up. If ninety-nine percent of
us are losers, then what right do we have to judge other pathetic
doofuses?
Unfortunately, cool, as we in the ninety-nine percent perceive
it, is often defined by showbiz. It's therefore prefabricated,
therefore self-conscious, therefore not cool. For instance, the
recent brouhaha of heroin chic. Why would heroin be chic? Because
rock stars do it? Then why isn't being manipulated by your handlers
or conversing with Kurt Loder cool? How can anything that anyone
with a trust fund can do possibly be cool? Why not cough syrup
chic? Or horse pill chic? Or spray paint chic? We can all walk
around with feathered hair, peach fuzz mustaches, Metallica t-shirts,
and silver paint flecks around our mouths and noses. Why aren't
any of these cool? Because Calvin Klein says so and most people
will happily agree that he's trapped in the ninety-nine percent
with the rest of us. If Calvin Klein is dictating cool, then
it's time to tear down the monster.
The good news is that while so few of us are cool, our gigantic
and sad group does include: anyone who has ever appeared on The
Real World, all those vegetarians who smoke for some strange
reason, people who wear leather jackets in above 80 degree weather,
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, anyone with a web page (computers
are useful for accessing information, but so are file cabinets
and they're not very cool, either), and anyone 24 or under. Once
these people realize that they're just as dorky as the rest of
us, then we're all going to get along alot better. Won't that
be nice? Answer me with a smile.
As for me, I doubt I'm very cool. The fact that I drop obscure beach movie references in my opening paragraphs in order to be clever makes me way too self-conscious to be anything other than a doofus.