Note: please do not whistle along with Otis in public. You are not, yourself, watching the tide roll away. Thank you.
And: in the ever-expanding category of What the Hell Are They Thinking? - may I add: fake bullet-hole stickers for one's car. (The folks who maintain that link also sell fake "bull's balls" for one's truck. I do believe any comment from me on this product is utterly unnecessary.) Now, if you look up the phrase "fake bullet holes," you will discover that many of the manufacturers pretend that these are "prank" stickers, easily removable (they say), that you might put on a friend's car - say, at a bar, while pretending to visit the restroom, so that upon wobbling out of the place at bartime, you can point to your friend's car and say, "Whoa, dude - looks like someone shot up your ride har har har." While the humor content of this scenario is measurable if negligible, I just can't fathom who'd want to put these on their own car. My neighbor, though, for one - my neighbor who obsessively washes his little red Toyota Matrix or Ford Echo or whatever it is several times a week (fake bullet-holes, good; the merest suggestion of dust, bad), my neighbor who mows his lawn wearing shorts and wading boots, my neighbor with the NRA stickers on his garage, the garage that he doesn't park in (it's filled with god knows what) because he parks next to the garage on a patch of gravel he's laid down. I think I'm afraid to talk to him.
I'm theorizing that this is perhaps another case of that weird phenomenon of suburbanites having gangsta envy - what, your life's so boring you need to imagine being shot at? I should mention that my neighbor is a white guy in his mid- to late forties, not some young dude entranced by the captivating masculinity of MTV gangsta rappers. (Okay, so maybe he's a middle-aged dude entranced by the captivating masculinity etc.) Obviously these folks have never actually been shot at, and I'm one of those boringly practical people who just can't conceive the cachet of being thought of having been shot at, so it's a complete mystery to me.
3 comments:
The key is "whistle along with" - that is, the song's playing, and they're whistling along with it (usually out of tune) and wrecking it. Okay - not that big a deal, and perhaps my experience here is colored by the specific incident being that we were out for Sunday brunch, and what began as a nice day with some nice Otis Redding playing turned increasingly annoying as the bartender kept increasing the volume and playing the favorite songs of the two idiot fratboys at the bar scarfing bloody Marys and singing along at the top of their lungs to bloody "Heat of the Moment" by Asia which jeez I didn't even know was such a huge popular hit still and these guys were barely old enough to drink much less even be alive when the track was popular in 1982 and by that point we were glad to get out of there into the bright sun where I found some punctuation on the ground which was a period. There.
By the way, I apologize for using the word "dude" more than once in a single entry. As penance, I will force myself to listen to someone say "bling" and try to avoid cringeing. ("cringing"? Neither one looks right. "To avoid looking as if I am, in fact, in the midst of a cringe." There.)
But the fake bulletholes complete the fake-mobster-getaway-car look of the PT Cruiser!
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