i hate girls who wear abercrombie and fitch

it seems to me that the cool kids of today have a bit of an inferiority problem. you see, we're the first generation to grow up in a world full of what can sometimes seem like plastic artifice. when said 'cool kids' were growing up in the 70's and 80's the boom of cheap, fake-seeming products was going on across the board. you know, like tee-shirts with stupid prints or words on them, breakable non-timeless toys, vinyl siding, those metal radiator things that go all along the sides of the room, and generally all manner of flimsy, easily producible, plastic objects made to replace earlier versions of things made out of metal or wood. i don't know what it was, but it seems like during the 70's technology suddenly figured out how to manufacture everything out polystyrene and the whole world switched over completely without miding. particularly offensive in my opinion was that stupid brush-stroke cursive lettering that they put on signs and logos (am i supposed to believe that somebody hand-wrote the name of your business in 10-foot tall letters on this billboard, and if so, why would that make it cool?) for better or worse over the next few decades everything lost a certain element of old-fashionedness.

anyway, all this stuff basically made people feel like they were growing up in a world without substance, getting jipped. when you went to a movie you never used to see the actor dealing with one of those lunch-cooler bags or aluminum baseball bats, they would have a brown paper bag and a wooden bat. i know that i noticed these differences at a certain point and thereafter always sort of wished that they would make buildings to look old (instead of those big, cubical, cement and glass things), that soda bottles were still made out of glass instead of plastic, and that some photos and tv shows were still in black and white. i certainly wish that there weren't baseball teams whose colors were turquoise or purple with, again, that goddamn brush-stroke lettering. eventually i think other people started to be bothered by it too and realized that old-fashioned stuff is often cooler, and so we started getting a lot of movies set in the 30's or 40's and the word "classic" peppered all over the place. and a little after that, kids whose whole existence taken place had been in the age of television and disposable products started wishing that they, too, lived important non-disposable lives, and hence, the birth of the most irritating trend ever: "faux authenticity."

basically the psychological trauma of living in a fake-looking world had two main consequences:
a) people buying stuff that looks old or worn in so that they feel real and important.
b) people trying to pretend that the cheap crap they grew up with was cool, thereby implying that they have always been real and important.

sure, fitted baseball caps are nice, but aside from those (a) has produced nothing but a vast sea of insufferable nonsense. people paying large sums of money for clothes or things that look old and worn out. now, worn out stuff is fine if you do it yourself; it isn't supposed to be cool to other people, just more comfortable or sentimental for yourself. and you certainly shouldn't pay more for it to be that way. just wrong.
but that's not the worst part. the worst part is those goddamn t-shirts with the effin' fake accomplishments. you know what i'm talking about. "abercrombie swim team - junior varsity" or "california joe's bait and tackle." t-shirts made to look like cheap give-always depicting places that don't exist or stuff that you never did. phony life experience. i mean, everyone knows that you just bought a shirt saying you went to "mohasasquamitit summer camp," you're not even trying to fool anyone, so what the hell are you doing? if having a bunch of free t-shirts depicting things you've done is supposed to be cool (which i've never been convinced of anyway), how exactly does declaring to the world that you have to buy such shirts improve your standing?! its just the kind of reasoning i would expect from someone who would drop $40 on a tattered "abercrombie curling society, new mexico chapter."

(b) is the height of insecurity. for this one i always picture one of those insolent, frat-hopping moron types squirming in an interrogation room while he strains to convince the polygraph that he "always thought trucker caps were cool! seriously! oww! [electric zapping noise]."
enough said.

i'm not trying to go on a diatribe about fashion or anything, its just that i dislike the phoniness of it all. i hate phonies. goddamn. why sometimes i just hate them so much that i wish i could just be, like, a catcher. standing in the rye on the side of a crazy cliff, just catching people if they start to go over...