halloween

Now, I don’t mean this as a personal attack against those of you who enjoy Halloween. But it’s not my cup of tea, not at all. It combines a couple of big things I don’t like with a very small number of things I do like. And besides, it’s on a Saturday this year, and it’s very hard to drag me away from my house on a Saturday during the college football season.

Things I don’t like about Halloween:

The costumes. Now, lots of people have amazing, hilarious, clever costumes. But if you’re going to do Halloween right, you have to have a costume. You look like a tool if you don’t, and if you just half-ass it you still look like a tool. So partaking in Halloween requires three things: creativity (to come up with a great costume idea), hard work (to actually pull said idea off), and a certain degree of exhibitionism (because any costume is ultimately a plea of “Hey, look at me!”). I’m pretty lacking in all three of those areas. I’m always amazed at the costume ideas people come up with—all sorts of things I’d never think of. And the amount of time, money, and work involved in pulling off a good costume is way too high. And, despite the fact that I have a blog, and despite the fact that I do like to think of myself as a very, very, very minor celebrity, and despite the fact that I do enjoy performing (an exhibitionist hobby if there ever were one), I don’t need the attention that comes from the perfect, outrageous, intelligent costume. And the problem with Halloween that you need to have some sort of costume. At least with Mardi Gras you can just put on one of those striped purple green and gold rugby shirts and leave it at that. But with Halloween people are gonna judge you if your costume isn’t good. So why bother?

hipsters

I feel kind of conflicted writing this. Because I don’t hate all hipsters. And the term is a horrendously nebulous one, anyway. And it’s difficult to mock hipsters without becoming one—their movement is so obsessed with irony and putative non-conformity and feelings of superiority that just pointing out their faults makes one a sort of hipster. And because we’re all hipsters to some extent. You’re reading a blog entry about hipsters, for fuck’s sake. And even worse—I’m writing one! While researching for this I went to urbandictionary.com and the 2nd result for hipster is: “You, for reading ironic, pseudo-intellectual dictionary entries on the word ‘hipster.'” Touché, my friend, touché. And so much of the hipster mocking that goes on (LATFH being the prime example with stuff white people like operating in a similar vein) attacks a ridiculous straw-man version of hipsters. I feel like the examples I see every day are easy enough to mock, so why bother with an exaggerated paragon of the stereotype?

cigarette littering

I had been planning on doing an essay on my hatred of smoking,* and while I won’t go through with writing that whole spiel at the moment, I was infuriated today when I was driving down the Interstate and a woman, some no-good punkish twentysomething hipster chick with short blond hair, driving a beat-up piece-of-shit Chevy she probably got from her white trash parents or stole from her ex-boyfriend, flicked a cigarette out of her car window. It bounced up off the roadway and hit my windshield. What a despicable, disgraceful, disgusting crime. It pisses me off any time I see this happen, but having it hit my windshield really set me off. Obviously it wasn’t going to cause any damage, but what if I’d had a convertible, or had my windows open? Do I really want a cigarette butt hopping into my car, maybe even hitting me in the face as I’m driving sixty miles an hour? I don’t think so, you fucking bitch. I take some satisfaction in the fact that you’ll probably die a miserable death from cancer or emphysema or some disgusting shit like that, with no one to love you because you’re such a self-centered, arrogant, mindless douchebag. It’s a free country, and you can kill yourself any way you like,** but you do not have the right to treat I-10 Eastbound as your own personal motherfucking ashtray. I know your car was such an old shitpile it came from the days when they still put ashtrays in cars. So you don’t have any excuse, you selfish little littering bitch. You’re lucky it was the interstate and I was on my way to work. Had we been coming up to a stoplight somewhere I would have gotten out of my car and punched you in the face before grabbing your cigarettes and throwing them down the nearest storm drain.

*I’m also planning a piece on my hatred of smoking bans in private buildings. In other words, I’ll have a piece that’s anti-smoking, and a piece that’s anti-anti-smoking.

**I’m gonna die from bacon. Much, much tastier way to go.