Arguments from the Arctic ...

Time for some levity. Time for the inconsequential.

Can't concentrate at all right now. I sit in Boise's most conventional alternative coffee shop, Dawson Taylor, where the eccentrics chill and give people like me the hairy eyeball. That is, people who don't partake in their uniform individuality. Oh, oxymorons for morons. I love it! I feel bad for the employees, who are genuinely amiable and seem to be of reasonable sensibility. Even as a marketer, I couldn't deal with posturing all day. If Jared was here, he'd go berserk and create a whirlwind of eyeliner and self-loathing.

I get the impression that a lot of transients, out-of-towners, and geriatrics randomly stumble into DT not knowing they'll be confronted by the Too Cool Crew. It would be terrible for business if these aforementioned regulars didn't develop a cult-like obsession with being different and hanging out at the same place every day. I guess that'd seem more reasonable if I didn't have a job, a purpose, or a life. Well, I've got two-to-three of those, depending on the day. That ain't bad. I pose this question: is today's emo culture analogous to that of the 60's hippie culture? I am not fond of either, but at least the hippies had principles. (Well, some of them. Most are just idealistically uninvolved. Being anti-establishment isn't an excuse to be lazy and feckless.) I don't even like to use the terms "emo" or "punk" because they have become so broad and amorphous that I'm not sure it applies to whom I'm referring. I'm mostly lambasting the armchair rebels who regurgitate the philosophies of Marx, Gandhi, and Guevara without truly understanding them.

I have a certain distaste for hippies, because, truly, they were often, and continue to be, lazy and impractical. That's a broad generalization, but I believe a fair characterization of the group. However, I don't disagree with a lot of the movement's ideals. Many were impractical and not carried out with appropriate tact, but at least they were progressive. I'm trying to decide whether these emunks (contrived portmanteau of "punk" and "emo") have any of that fire or they're just babies. In their defense, they generally are babies; they're in their teens and early-twenties, whereas hippies were 10-20 years their senior. However, that just accentuates one of the reasons that frustrates me the most: they don't know anything, but act like they know everything. They know pain, dude. Pain is a three-gauge earring.

Ah, I'm just kidding. I only hate the poseurs and the pedantic. And even then I'm pretty tolerant. No one should ever typecast and I'm reminded of that every day. I've told a couple of you about my experience at the Fred Meyer register when I was buying yoga mat and shamefully assumed the guy behind me thought I was a fairy or something. "Yoga, huh?" the guy in the flannel shirt asked with a cock-eye and a guttural tone. "Oh, great," I thought. " ... I'm getting rolled in the parking lot." In a nutshell, we ended up talking about yoga for about ten minutes and he encouraged me take it seriously because he'd been doing it FOR TWENTY YEARS.

It's obviously natural to group people and assign them characteristics based on how their looks ... but, why? Is it simply easier to exercise prejudice and dismiss 99% of the people who don't share our style so we can get on with our lives? Well, we do know everything and have met everyone. What an annoying burden to treat people as individuals. ;-)

Equally annoying is the cold weather that keeps resurfacing like some terrible rash. Its bitterness is only heightened by every DT denizen who walks into the place, flinging the door open so wide that the caffeine-crazed poseurs could fit three-wide. Each time someone walks through the door, I feel like I'm in witnessing the lead-up to a Wild West gunfight from the barstool in some old saloon. The door swings to-and-fro as if Wild Bill Hickok himself just entered the room and it's time for gun-slingin' at sundown!

Probably doesn't help that I was fooled by the peevish Les Bois weather gods and wore shorts and flip-flops. I'm warming myself with my laptop battery. I guess I have only myself to blame at this point. Myself and the emunks.

Equal parts tolerance and jocularity,
BJB