Totalling up the fluff
The problem with status symbols is that they’re just that: symbols. They represent something, but not necessariy what’s intended by their bearer. Consuming overpriced cuisines, sporting designer labels, and traveling to parts of the world from which our ancestors desperately emigrated do not a superior person make. And it’s flat out gross how pervasive this kind of effluvious materialism is in the gay community.
I remember the summer after I’d just come out, I was hanging out in front of a club in West Hollywood with some friends. We weren’t old enough to get in, so we were just chatting with fellow exiled minors there on the street. I was talking with a chestnut-topped cutie who was around my age, and we were discussing a guy who’d just pulled up to park his car.
"He’s not that cute, though," I opined.
"Yeah, but look at his car," the cutie glazed over.
I thought, What the fuck does that have to do with anything?
And this obsession with labels is retarded-and-a-half. It’s sad when someone morphs into a human billboard, brandishing garish designer logos like they’re royal magic badges. It is the epitome of self-distance to define yourself by someone else’s name as it appears stenciled ‘cross the ass of your jeans. An awfully expensive way to say, "I don’t like myself," don’t you think?
And what’s with people who turn a group conversation or their personal cell phone discourse into a General Public Announcement, hiking up the volume of their voice in pre-meditated earshot of passers by? Your inane escapades may not so much impress a third party as horrify them, FYI. Or at least nauseate them. Definitely annoy them.
Tone it down. There are no cameras around. It’s just reality, there is no show. Try to be better, not have more. Just food for thought, y’all.
September 9th, 2005 at 4:25 pm
Judging people based on the cars, clothes, and travel plans that they may or may not have might seem frivolous. Judging them based on the fact that at first glance they aren’t cute enough or buff enough or str8 acting enough or GAY enough would be equally frivolous. Judging them at all is pretty arrogant don’t you think?
Your West Hollywood curbside conversation reminded me of a little retort that I heard all the time from my ex-wife. If he and I had been standing there on the curb instead of you and the chestnut haired hottie, our conversation would have gone like this:
J: “That guy getting out of that car isn’t that cute.”
M: “True, but check out his car! I love that car!”
J: “Well then, why don’t you marry it!?!”
Josh responds:
Your ex had a point. You shoulda stayed with him. (lol)
I wasn’t so much attacking the idea that it is frivolous or superfluous to judge someone, only to judge them on the things they have and not the person they are. Someone’s physical appearance is a valid factor in determining if you’d go out with them; the car they drive shouldn’t be.
Although I admint, if Hottie McFine rode up in a diarrhea green 1972 Gremlin to pick me up for a date, I’d have to politely decline…