We live in a great, big, ever-changing country, with new types of people emerging all the time. It’s good to keep an eye on the emerging trends, as there’s a constant back-and-forth between our families and the culture. Most of the people will never cross your path, but then again they might marry your sister. As I glide through airports and shopping malls with my mental notepads, these are a few of the new groups I have observed.
We have heard of internet trolls, despicable people who slither along the net, spewing hateful comments at innocent people who are just looking for a funny video or a challah bread recipe. Well, they are no longer anonymous. I see them. They are here in the airport with me right now. The giveaway: They look like actual trolls, if trolls were actual beings, and from what I can see on this Starbucks line, they are.
They are mainly white guys with little raisin, shame-filled eyes that peek out from beneath the dirty wool hats that they wear year-round. They stagger around on stubby, rounded legs, with their shoulders hunched over from their constant, downward, cellular gaze.
They have pudgy noses and long, unkempt beards that grow out of their splotchy, sun-starved skin. These aren’t well-groomed hipster beards and artisanal mustaches. These are grown from years of neglect, giving them the straggly look of creatures who live under a bridge or in a mushroom patch.
They have little potbellies filled with cheeses and sausages and yeasty beers named after dogs and obscure mountain ranges. They have round, meaty hands that they use to pick their noses and stick in their pants, which they often do in crowds, thinking if they don’t look at other people, then the others can’t see them. But I see them, lurking over their laptops and smartphones, spewing out obscenities with those same dirty hands.
If you get close to them, they smell like old ham and corn chips. When they breathe out, their breath is reminiscent of the inside of a barn, filled with dirty livestock.
The adult acne on their faces proves that they don’t wash very often and the stains on their worn-out shirts show that, with all the time they spend online, laundry day doesn’t happen too often.
I imagine that their beds are constructed like a rat’s nest out of newspaper clippings, used tissues, foam food containers, soy sauce packets, and other materials that they were able to shave down into nesting material with their pointy teeth.
They don’t come out of their dens too often, but when they do they are easy to spot if you know what to look for. There’s no need to fear them, but at the same time don’t get too close or you could catch some ancient, reptilian disease for which there is no cure.
Technology is all around us—saving people’s lives, curing blindness, enabling the elderly to breathe, and exposing troublemakers around the globe. Technology is powerful and exciting unless, of course, it is in the hands of idiots.
There is an idiot sitting near me in this car wash waiting area, right now. I picked out a quiet seat, next to the brochure display, and all was well until this woman marched into this oasis with her smartphone on speaker. Speaker! So we can all hear the even louder woman on the other end of this call, who can’t believe what her boyfriend said to her last night.
This is a techno-idiot.
It is a rare thing to find silence anywhere in this country. Everywhere I go there are leaf blowers, car horns, and airplanes roaring up above. All of which make the added noise of techo-idiots blabbering away on phones, playing music without earbuds, and letting their “It’s Raining Men” ringtone go off in the library all that much worse.
These people must be stopped and we must be the ones to stop them. If they are breaking the social norms of quiet space, then we should be allowed to spray them with water bottles, toss French fries at them, and let our dogs loose when they pass by.
Human beings are tribal. Since the days of living in caves and eating farm-to-table woolly mammoths, we tend to seek out and stay with like-minded groups. This has helped form communities and book clubs, but it can also make us alienate anyone who is different from us. In extreme cases this separation from others can turn violent and erupt into conflict and war.
The replacement for this aggression in our modern culture is sports. Thank God for football, basketball, hockey, and baseball. They really do so much more than people realize.
If you don’t like sports and you find watching them a waste of time, I get it. There are millions of people who crossed paths with jocks while growing up, and they were the sole cause of their unhappiness. But that is exactly why you should be thankful that sports exist.
Without them, these packs of wild men would literally be running through your towns looking for fights. If the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cleveland Browns weren’t around, filling their stadiums with eighty thousand fans, what do you think those barbarians would do with their idle time?
Steeler fans would organize, make a flag, get some uniforms, and hold meetings about those awful sons-of-bitches in Cleveland. Then they would get drunk, buy weapons, and load into cars and head to Lake Erie. Not to an organized stadium, but to the streets, where they would drag people out of their homes and beat them with wooden planks.
Thank God for the NFL.
And so now we have super fans, those fellow citizens you see walking around dressed like the players. They wear jerseys, hats, and colored socks and paint their faces and torsos. What is this, if not war regalia? They identify with these teams. They research the enemy. They bleed the team colors. Without this they would be bleeding real blood and ours would somehow be in the mix.
Let them buy bumper stickers for their cars and banners for their homes. Let them play dress-up and scream at the TV. Let them stand for hours in parking lots, eating cooked meat and getting drunk from cans of beer, mocking fans in different colors.
Is there anything wrong with these people? I say no. They come from a certain warrior line of DNA. They are the soldiers who fought the necessary fights that protected families and formed cities and towns. They weren’t pretty back then, they’re not pretty now and that’s the point. They’re not looking for acceptance, they’re looking for a fight. So be grateful they’re screaming at Tom Brady and not you.
the angry, middle-aged white guy
There are millions of middle-aged white guys, but the thing that sets this new group apart is the anger. These guys are pissed off. They are angry at young people, they are angry at women, they are angry at just about everybody. They are even angry at other angry middle-aged white guys.
You can spot them because they have stopped caring about how they look. They wear the one pair of jeans they bought twenty years ago and a dirty baseball hat with the logo of a tool company or fish on it. They all have the same potbelly and faded T-shirt they got for free from a thing a long time ago. They don’t shave very often and their white whiskers look like cactus spikes against their sunburned faces.
They get in the car and start calling other drivers names before they even pull out of the driveway. They think everyone is a moron driving around like an idiot just to mess with them. As far as they’re concerned everyone on the road drives too fast, too slow, and are too stupid to get out of the way.
Everyone is the enemy. The slow cashier. The cops. The neighbors. The Mexicans. The Muslims. The weather. Squirrels. The neighbor’s dog. The neighbor’s cat. The neighbor’s kids. Traffic. Lines. Stores. Music. TV shows. Commercials. Politicians. Waiters. The phone company. The cable company. The TSA. The airlines. The EPA. Girl Scouts. Time. Their penis. Reading glasses. Apps that ask for passwords. Computers. Rain. Sun. God. Their wives. Their children. And the New York Yankees.
These guys are really pissed off.
This is what happens when you win too much. You win your whole life, you think it’s going to last forever, but eventually you get old and life ends up on top. It’s the one time when being white in America isn’t an advantage and they’ve decided to go down swinging.
What they fail to realize is that it’s not the world conspiring against them, it’s their own mortality. No matter how angry they get and how many dinner parties they ruin with their angry rants, they can’t turn back the clock. Life is too short to be that angry.
So when you see them coming, it’s best just to get out of their way. They’ll find someone or something else to be angry with. And if they’re coming over for Thanksgiving, do your best to sit at the other end of the table, and don’t let anyone discuss anything.
If you have ever gone to a back-to-school night or been caught in line at at carpool, you have run into a new kind of mom. The Hot Mom. They are youthful, attractive, and should be stopped.
You should see the moms at my kids’ school. It’s like a competition. They must get up at five in the morning to get ready so they can be the Hot Mom. But here is the thing: Some dads might be interested, a few mothers a little jealous, but no kid wants their mom to be hot.
When you’re a kid, you don’t want a hot mom, you want a blend-in mom. Just a flowered housedress and wobbly bingo-arms mom. Big sloppy mom boobs that you can curl up in, like a cinnamon-scented beanbag chair. That’s a mom. She’s warm and cuddly and makes kick-ass mac and cheese.
And I have news for you, if you are the Hot Mom: The other moms aren’t calling you hot. They’re calling you a whore.
These are young couples who haven’t done anything but for some reason think they know everything about life. I was sitting on a beach next to a pair and they were talking about how they’re going to raise their children when they have them one day.
“I just think that it’s important that they know you love them,” she said. “So when I come home, anytime I walk in the door I am going to put down my bags, sit on the floor, and hold them for five straight minutes. Because, like, a child needs to know that you care more about them than you do about all this other stuff going on in the world. So like, that would be my rule, like every time I come home. Like, I just don’t know why more parents don’t do that.”
If you have kids, and you have thrown this book against the wall, walked around the block a couple times, and have returned, welcome back.
Can you imagine how little this woman knows about being the head of a family? As if the only reason you don’t give your child all of your attention the minute you walk in the door is because you are selfish. How about the fact that when you walk in the door the kids are screaming, the dog is biting the babysitter, and, if you don’t make dinner and feed everyone in the next ten seconds, everyone’s schedule is off and they won’t get to bed on time, and oh, yeah, everyone has the stomach flu.
The thing they talked about next really put me over the top. And it’s not just the subject matter and the complete lack of knowledge that made me want to throw them into traffic. It was that arrogant tone that condescends to everyone on the planet but them. That half-whining, self-involved cadence that sounds like they just woke up and ends everything with a little bit of a question mark even though they aren’t asking at all.
“I think I want to get a dog first, because it’s just like a child,” he said. “But I don’t want a little dog, like a pug; screw pugs.”
“Pugs are gross.”
“Yeah. And then my brother was telling me to get a pure breed, because you know what you’re getting, but I feel like there are so many dogs out there who need help, you know?” he said as he sipped his cold brew before going on.
“Have you heard of wolf dogs? They are part dog and part wolf and they’re pretty amazing but have, like, this really bad reputation because people don’t know how to treat them? And I just feel like I would be the type of person, I mean, I never had a dog, but I feel like I would be really good with a wolf dog. Like, I would be able to understand them more than other people.”
All I could think was, Please get a wolf dog. Please. I would love nothing more than for you to get a wolf dog and when your girlfriend comes home and sees that it ate her boyfriend, we’ll see if she still drops what she’s doing and sits on the floor for five minutes to let it know she loves it.