One Upping A One-Upper; Mission: Impossible

Ever tell a story about something that was so amazing that happened to you and then had it immediately swept under the rug by a One-Upper?  Do you know any One-Uppers in your neighborhood?  I’m positive they’re there.  They’re everywhere.  In pharmacies and bars and pet stores and public restrooms.  They’re a little difficult to spot from far away, but once you get up close and are actively participating in a conversation it becomes crystal clear that you are now face to face with a One-Upper.  They use your stories as launching pads for their better, more awesome stories.  They never listen to you or anyone else because they already have better anecdotes that always seem to border on pure folklore, cocked and ready to fire, waiting for you to finish so they can empty their story clip into your lame-o story and fill it full of holes, sending it plummeting to the ground where it crashes into a gigantic ball of fictitious fire, probably burning down several homes in the process. 

I imagine in the inside of the One-Upper’s heads there are stadiums packed with fans cheering and yelling as they reveal their spectacular yarns to stunned and thrilled audiences who hang on their every word.  You could tell a story about how you jumped your BMX bike over 20 schoolchildren when you were ten years old and the One-Upper will tell you how they jumped over 30 school kids plus a pregnant dog, which to them, counts as about six dogs.  You could tell a story about how one day you ate a twelve pound burrito in less than an hour and then pooped it out in less than five minutes and the One-Upper will tell you how they ate six three pound burritos in less than twenty minutes and didn’t poop for two weeks.  You could tell a story about how you competed in a triathlon on the moon with Neil Armstrong last year and a One-Upper will tell you how they flew to Mars, married an alien and raised a family of five, opened a small import/export business and retired before returning to earth.  It doesn’t matter what you say, the One-Upper will always surpass anything you may have done in your life that would seem slightly interesting to normal people but very, very boring to the One-Upper.  

If gone unchecked, the One-Upper’s tales of their own fascination with themselves can often escalate into a game of fictional ingenuity, even when the story may seem not only blatantly false, but supremely preposterous and sometimes even physically or mathematically impossible.  The goal of the One-Upper seems to be to garner as much attention as they can get.  They want us to shut the heck up with our lame stories and start ‘ooohhing’ and ‘aaaahhing’ when they give us access to their spectacular tales.  At some point everyone begins to silently realize that certain factoids of the One-Upper’s story may not be entirely true.  However, for some reason no one is able to rid the conversation of the One-Upper or inform them that listening to other people is not a bad thing.

The One-Upper often butts into conversations that they have no business being involved in.  All it takes is for them to hear more than one person talking and they immediately begin shooting down their stories like a duck hunter firing into a crowd of rowdy NASCAR fans.  They hone in on other stories like a lion chasing a gang of alter boys on Good Friday, dicing and mincing them up with their own tales of heroism or misfortune or that really, really funny thing that happened to them at McDonalds one day.

The One-Upper is a close cousin of the Know-It-All.  They both think that everyone that they’re talking to is an idiot.  They both believe that they are stimulating everyone’s boring lives with provocative and exhilarating yarns filled with gobs of juicy information.  What separates them is that the One-Upper is much like a hyperactive Chihuahua constantly on the hunt for baby chipmunks to scare the crap out of, where the Know-It-All is more like a sagely old elephant, slowly walking along dispensing wisdom and knowledge while thinking to themselves, “You’re welcome universe.”

The other day in my Operation Desert Storm Re-enactor’s club we were sitting around a campfire guarding about ten thousand Iraqi Prisoners Of War Re-enactors when a One-Upper tried to tell us about the time he personally invaded the country of Lichtenstein by himself, overthrew the government and renamed the country ‘Hank’ after his grandfather who was a cop in San Diego.  We took that One-Upper prisoner, unintentionally changing the course of that particular re-enacted conflict, held him for ransom for eight days, to which a billionaire from Saudi Arabia then paid six hundred thousand dollars for his release, but was immediately disappointed to discover that he had just paid for a One-Upper to a bunch of Gulf War Veteran Re-enactors who have never been in the military at all.  Only a couple of us had some Boy Scout experience.  Apparently, he thought he was buying a racehorse or something.

The fact that we even tolerate the One-Upper says a lot for our collective mettle, not to mention our national stamina.  That we endure the narcissistic, vainglorious oral compositions that contain more wonder, more danger, more action, more adversity and just all around more awesomeness than our own stories says in itself that we are a mightily tolerant society, where in a whole ‘nother part of the world the One-Upper would probably be packed into a suitcase and put on a flight to Antarctica where the luggage would be intentionally lost somewhere during a connecting flight in Brazil and never seen again.

Everyone has an interesting story.  Everyone has experiences that we can enjoy and sometimes even learn from.  One-upping someone’s story is not the way to have a good conversation.  It is a way, however, to identify yourself as someone everyone can really do without.  Let us tell our stories of spectacular parties we’ve been to or how poor we were when we graduated from college and had to survive on Top Ramen and sunflower seeds or driving really fast on the freeway while fleeing the cops.  Yes, we know you’ve been to more spectacular parties and that you’ve been poorer and have driven faster.  Yes, thank you for telling us all that.  Now, here’s something I bet you the One-Upper has never heard before: Please leave.

A Royal Pain In Their Shorts

Well, the official invitation and seating list for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding has come out and, once again, I am not on that list.  Sure, David Beckham and his wife what’s-her-name are on the list.  They’re always on the list.  They’re on every list.  I don’t know why.  She wears giant, bug-eyed sunglasses while drinking Midori sours all day long while he gets paid millions of dollars to not win soccer championships.  I have a trophy for the 1985 Utah state breakdancing championship under my house!  He’s never showed me a soccer trophy once!  Also invited is, surprise, Elton John.  Wow!  I guess they decided to keep it pretty orthodox by inviting the usual stale celebrity crowd that shows up to just about any event to get their faces splashed all over the gossip pages.  They have also personally insulted me by adding Mr. Bean to the list of invitees.  Charles knows that Mr. Bean and I have had a very unpleasant and awkward friendship after I told him that he was the weak link in the film Rat Race and that perhaps he should take up re-shingling old roofs as an alternative career.  Both Chuck and Mr. Bean cannot take constructive criticism like they claim they can.

This is the second time in my life that the Royal Family has overlooked my presence at one of their silly weddings.  The first time, of course, being Bill’s dad’s wedding to Princess Diana.  I was only ten at the time, but I still haven’t forgotten the sting of rejection.  As I watched that catastrophe unfold on TV I couldn’t help but to think that I had told Beezus (Diana loved that name and all her closest friends called her that.  She actually hated it when people called her Di.) only weeks prior that marrying this stiff, floppy eared member of a family that has lived off of the charity of British citizens for centuries was a huge mistake.  Beezus didn’t listen to me because she was head over heels in love with this royal buffoon, so I just let it be.  She was an adult and she knew what she was doing and I didn’t want to meddle on her special day.

For the record, I was also not invited to Fergie and Andrew’s wedding but I don’t really count that as an oversight on their part because I knew that that marriage wouldn’t last at all due to Andrew’s addiction to hardcore pornography and Fergie’s obsession with metal detecting.  I simply didn’t want to be involved in that matrimonial blunder in any way, shape or form.

I was told that, if I had been invited, I would have been sitting in the section right behind Queen Liz’s seat.  Honestly, if I had to sit behind that giant derby hat that I know she’ll be wearing, blocking my view of everything, I would probably vomit all over their 17^th century carpet so it is probably best that I wasn’t invited. 

I heard, through some confidential informants, that they have also invited a herd of African elephants, the ghost of Jack LaLanne and the remaining members of the Wu Tang Clan.  From the looks of what I’ve seen so far it seems that they are intentionally designing their guest list to resemble a gigantic slap in my face.  Just about every invitee has some personal grudge towards me and I imagine have gotten to Chuck and Bill’s ear before I had a chance to plead my case.  Well, Jack LaLanne and his fancy aerobic underoos can just kiss my ass!

My gift to the newlyweds was going to be a karaoke version of Once Bitten, Twice Shy by Great White, Kathy’s and Bill’s favorite song.  I just know that they are going to play that song for their first dance and I wanted to be the one to sing it.  Well, thanks to some sneaky assistants I’ve been cut out of the loop and it will probably now be Harry singing his version, which is pretty pathetic.  Believe me, I’ve heard him sing it at Bill’s bachelor party.  He just can’t hit the high notes like I can.  I was also going to present them with coupons for a free taco dinner at our house whenever they were in town.  I make pretty good tacos.  It’s a very simple recipe; ground turkey with onions, Anaheim chiles, green chiles, and tomato sauce.  They’re absolutely fantastic.  I made them once when I was visiting Billy and Kathy at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.  The whole family went berserk over these tacos!  Kathy wanted to open a restaurant in Glasgow immediately and sell tacos to Scottish people.  I was grateful, but I remained level-headed and reminded her that tacos just can’t be thrust into the face of any culture.  They have to be coaxed and eased and nudged into their national palette.  People that have been eating haggis for their entire history usually aren’t very receptive to new food stuffs.  I suggested that perhaps a couple of pop-up taco restaurants in the foothills of the Scottish Highlands would be a good way in and she agreed.  Well, I hope Kathy and Bill enjoyed them because I don’t think I’ll be making the Royal Family tacos any time soon.

Well, once again I guess I’ll have to watch the royal debacle from the comfort of my own home while sipping on Midori sours all day.  I’m not one to hold grudges, but in this case I feel that the guest list, the seating chart, in fact, the entire wedding altogether is probably their way of politely telling me to stay away from Buckingham Palace, London and Great Britain altogether.  I know when I’m not welcome.  I just wish that the Royal Family would be honest enough to tell me to my face and not have to go through this façade just to send me a message.  Well Chuck and Liz and Bill and Kathy; message received.  I hope you both have a lovely wedding and I hope Elton John and Paul Potts and Susan Boyle don’t screw up on their version of God Save The Queen like they did at her birthday last year.  I felt supremely embarrassed for all three of them.  My version would have brought the house down.

Nitwits: The Clog In The Toilet Bowl Of Life

There are some people who seem to dilly-dally their way through life, clogging up the rest of society with their indecisiveness, their selfishness and their overall stupidity.  Yes, there are a lot of stupid people, but these ones in particular directly affect the rest of us, especially when we are in line waiting to conduct some form of business or transaction.  These people are the reason that lines exist in the first place.  If it weren’t for them we wouldn’t need fast food restaurants or Quickie Marts because everything would be smooth and streamlined, flowing effortlessly in a virtual utopia of consumer efficiency and decision-making.  To them, venturing out of their home is just one big guessing game.  They don’t seem to know where they are, what they want and what they are even doing out of the house at this time of day.  How these people made it this far in life without running themselves over with their own cars is beyond me.

They are the Nitwits of our society.  Slow and boneheaded in every aspect of humanity, holding up progress with their confused and imbecilic ideas, believing that they can just wing it when it comes to simple commerce.  These are people whose brains are in perpetual first gear on the freeway of life, and a great many of them seem to be hopelessly stuck in ‘park’.  They are the ones who stop in the middle of the street because they are lost, rather than pull over to the side of the road and consult their map and try and figure out where they are in life.  They have difficulty understanding complex choices like ‘Would you like large, medium or small?’, to which their response is, ‘How big is the large?’  One could probably expect to hear them ask ‘Where do babies come from?’ and ‘Why is the sky blue?’ in the same conversation.

They are overwhelmed with choices.  Their brains cannot handle multiple tasks.  They are the people for whom the term ‘one at a time’ was invented.  In Biblical times Nitwits were considered to be a nuisance and were usually stoned to death out of sheer frustration and annoyance by people who waited behind them at the market for several hours while the Nitwits tried to decide whether to buy a sack of dates or a baby goat.

Nitwits are slowly killing the rest of us with their “not-knowing-how-to-do-anything-in-life” way of life.  I think these are the same people who merge onto the freeway at 12 miles an hour, causing other cars behind them to screech to a virtual halt or swerve out of the way, knocking other cars off the road, as the Nitwit happily listens to a loop of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in their head.  

At restaurants or coffee shops they are unclear on what to order when it is finally their turn.  There is nothing more excruciating and painful than ending up behind one of these human snails in line at a Starbucks and watch them try to figure out whether they want an iced latte caramel mochaccino with candy sprinkles or a blended mocha frappuccino latte with chocolate swirls, all while asking if the tomato and basil pesto sandwiches are gluten free.  I imagine this is what Purgatory is like. 

In restaurants they consume vast quantities of valuable time with their complicated and nit-picky ordering.  They want the waiter to whittle and carve and chisel the menu down to their obnoxiously finicky and fuss-budgety liking, turning the chef’s creations into a dumbed-down version of high school cafeteria food. 

They are the people at the grocery store who watch the checker scan their enormous order, scan all of their coupons, see the total, make a ‘wow’ face and then decide to write a check, which, of course, they cannot find. 

Nitwits like to linger at the front of bank lines and bombard the bank teller with questions about their account and about the American banking system in general, having absolutely zero knowledge in either subject.  The tellers often need extra help with the Nitwit’s asinine questions and must then consult other tellers, taking those resources away from other customers who are prepared and simply want nothing more than to get the hell out of there, join a street gang, commit a major crime and be willingly sent to prison for the rest of their lives in the hopes that they would never have to experience anything that hellish ever again.

It must be pure hell at a Nitwit’s home when it comes time to decide whether to take a bath or take a shower or to simply rinse off with the garden hose out in the backyard.  A baby Nitwit must be particularly frustrating at breast-feeding time when the infant, unable to communicate yet, begins crying at the lack of choices they have and wonders if their mother has a third nipple somewhere they can try.

It is not lame to know what you want beforehand.  It is not lame to be prepared.  It is not lame to be considerate of people behind you and perhaps try and facilitate moving things along in life.  You know what is lame?  Being blind to everything around you as you walk out your front door.  Have a plan.  Have a goal.  For people who can’t handle more than one thing at a time, don’t try to decide what type of coffee you want on the fly.  Plan it beforehand.  Write it down and then memorize it at home.  Try ordering to yourself in the mirror.  If it proves to be too difficult, give a couple of bucks to a Cub Scout and have them order for you.  If that doesn’t work then maybe a pack of stray dogs ordering your coffee will prove to be more fruitful.  If you still find success elusive, then perhaps it would be best for all of us if you just stayed at home and drank tap water while watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island, allowing the rest of us got on with our lives unmolested by you and your indecisiveness, you Nitwit.

Attack of the Know-It-Alls

Have you ever felt stupid before?  I feel stupid all the time. Every day, in fact.  It’s no big deal.  I’ve accepted my limited IQ and just try to learn as much as I can along the way while keeping the buffoonery to a minimum.  I feel especially stupidy, however, when I’m talking to a Know-It-All.  You know these people?  They get their information from the radio and the newspaper and their favorite Know-It-All magazines and then graciously dispense it to the rest of humanity, filling our empty lives with their liquid, life-giving knowledge.  Here’s the dilemma that Know-It-Alls currently have, however; the application of their useless information to real life scenarios.  They seem to know everything about everything, and yet, there they are working side by side with the rest of us dummies.  You’d think that being a repository of such a wealth of information would perhaps land the Know-It-All a job at some prestigious think tank where they would spend days and nights solving the world’s problems.  You would think that some company out there would pay top dollar to constantly mine the Know-It-All’s brain for valuable data on how to make that company wealthier and more powerful and more able to take more advantage of more people.  You would think that by knowing everything there is to know there would be a line of people at their doorstep begging for advice on how to make their lives better and more fulfilling and more like Brad and Angelina’s lives.  One would even go so far to think that a Know-It-All would be so valuable to the human race that the government would relocate the Know-It-All and their family to a specially built module in outer space in an effort to protect their massive intellect from being drained by all of us imbeciles down here on earth.

One would think.

The truth is that Know-It-Alls do have very large reservoirs of mind numbingly, tediously, inanely, stale information, and yet, they seem to have absolutely zero knowledge on how to interact with other human beings or make themselves likeable.  They believe that a conversation is a one-way lecture on the meaning of life, and they are not the student. They think that we enjoy being constantly corrected for semantical mistakes that no one else seems to mind.  A single Know-It-All can bankrupt a whole conversation with pointless factoids that no one ever asked for.  They question the validity of the details of our stories and are constantly investigating where we got our facts from as if they are the lead detective in a story mangling crime scene.

I bet you that cavemen never tolerated a Know-It-All in their society.  I bet that those hairy, unkempt relatives of ours probably put the Know-It-All in their place before anything got out of hand in that cramped, funky smelling cave of theirs.  I bet Know-It-Alls don’t exist in the animal kingdom.  Look at a colony of ants.  You think that thousands of ants working their asses off, risking being doused by a can of Raid, trying to get food from my kitchen because I forgot to wipe off the counter last night would tolerate a single knucklehead ant standing there telling everyone else that they should lift the crumbs with their legs and not their backs because it could cause spinal problems in the future? 

Most of the time Know-It-Alls tell us what we already know.   Yes, we know that staring directly into the sun is bad for our eyes.  Yes, we know that leaving the toilet seat up is frowned upon when you’re married.  Yes, we know that ant colonies can range anywhere from a few dozen to a million and that Raid kills them all pretty much immediately.  But, it’s the way that Know-It-Alls present their information that’s so off-putting.  They make us feel foolish and moronic.  They make us feel like children who couldn’t make the cut when we tried out for the school play because we got stage fright right before the audition and as a result, peed our pants in front of everyone, ruining our playground credibility forever.  They make us feel as if our entire lives have been a complete waste of everyone’s time and that every word we’ve ever uttered has been an endless parade of lies. 

Know-It-Alls interrupt the natural flow of a gabfest with their endless desire to repair misstated facts, grammatical mistakes and trivial, pointless information that backs up no one’s story at all.  They don’t seem to realize that there is a certain level of error acceptability in communication that most people simply let slide.  Not the Know-It-All.  They are the conversation police handing out tickets to criminals for various social offenses such as improper sentence structure, failure to know how asphalt is made and insufficient understanding in the area of American tax laws.  They are the beaver dam in the middle of a swift moving conversation, halting the momentum with trivial tidbits of useless information.  They are the burnt piece of pretzel in the Chex Mix of life.  A Know-It-All is the single strand of hair that has found its way into your Caesar salad, ruining your appetite for the rest of the day. 

Knowledge is good.  Being intelligent is good.  Being curious about life and having the humility to learn new things from other people is good.  Shutting the toilet seat so that your wife doesn’t yell at you is good.  Raid is good.  Walking around the planet with a smug look on your face and looking down the bridge of your nose at other people because they don’t know that in 1887 something happened to some guy and his family that changed the course of history and now that’s why we have indoor plumbing is not only bad, it’s lame.  Quite lame.

Freedom To Fear In Ten Years Or Less

I’ve recently learned that the Department of Homeland Security will be discontinuing the colored threat level of scariness, a system that was designed to keep us safe and scared since the dreadful events that occurred on 9/11.  I thought this was a wonderful public service that not only warned us all of great dangers that may or may not befall us, but it would have or would not have given us ample time to prepare ourselves for the impending/eventual terrorist doom that may or may not come eventually/probably. 

The fact that announcing threat levels will no longer be a public service anymore, it seems to me, merely adds to the danger/havoc/catastrophe that we can all be sure is coming our way. So, now what is our plan of action in the case of a probable/eventual terror attack? Today’s world is scarier, more intimidating and creepier than ever before in our nation’s history. We must be on constant alert for not only potential terrorists but also other deviant groups of people who constantly threaten the sanctity of our public lives like drug dealers, jaywalkers, loiterers, reality stars, people who refuse to wear shirts and shoes inside 7-elevens and people who just don’t know how to stand in line at the grocery store without bumping in to you every twelve seconds. In my opinion, the government’s past recommended activities for the now defunct threat level system seemed a little unproductive, so I’ve come up with a new proactive warning system for thwarting not only eventual terrorist attacks but can also be effectively used for preventing all kinds of unwanted human behavior like peeping Toms, boring story tellers and unwanted dinner guests.

My solution for appropriate behavior for past threat level colors is to respond with corresponding Fear Levels in order to battle the terrorist/peeping/dimwit forces of the planet. Let’s start at the beginning.

Fear level Green: The Fear is Not Ripe Yet.  It’s okay to relax, but not too much.  This is where terrorists get their foot in the door, if given the opportunity.  You could be at a backyard barbeque or reading a book at the library and the next thing you know KABOOM!!!, you, your friends, your family and everything that was on that barbeque are now the size of bacon bits, ready to be sprinkled on a terrorist salad.  This level should be spent quickly glancing around as if you’re a dog and you just heard a sound somewhere in the distance and you’re trying to figure out what it is.  This tells the terrorists that you are alert and ready to act.

Fear level Blue: The Deep Blue Fear.  This is where you need to kick the fear into second gear.  Shaking your hands and jumping up and down as if you were getting ready for a boxing match is a good start.  Perhaps some impromptu stretching may also help ward away radical, barbeque-hating insurgents.  Are you preparing for a Thanksgiving 5K charity run, or are you priming yourself to do battle with the forces of evil?  The terrorists will never know, and that’s the way it should be.

Fear level Yellow: The Banana Supremacy.  Clench your fists and furrow your brows.  Walk around and look like you are about to punch a baby panda in the face.  Don’t say ‘thank you’ or ‘excuse me’ when out in public.  If someone says ‘hello’ or ‘good morning’, do not, I repeat, do not respond at all. At this time we should also begin raising our paranoia level accordingly.  There’s a knock at the door at 2 in the morning; is it the neighbors there to tell you that your house is on fire because you haven’t cleaned the chimney in years and you built an especially crackly fire that evening full of floating embers that caught some of the soot in the chimney on fire before you went to bed in a drunken stupor, or is it one of Osama bin Laden’s soldiers there to blow you and your family to kingdom come because you believe in freedom and they cannot live in a world where you believe in freedom?  Whatever the answer is, DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR!!!

Fear level Orange: Freedom Carrots.  Hold your breath until your face turns red.  Bug your eyes out as big as you can so that terrorists know you mean business. Of course, it’s going to hurt, but so will an ice chest full of grenades that are set to destroy freedom. Adding a twitch somewhere on your body is a nice touch of unpredictability.  Continue not responding to other human beings in public.  If you have to, look down at your phone or Blackberry and pretend to be sending an important text message.  This should let the terrorists know that you are not interested in small talk at all.

Fear level Red: Fruit of the Doom.  Prolonged bouts of shouting and punching the air will definitely scare any would-be bomber off.  Shave the number 53 in your scalp to confuse anyone trying to wreak havoc on your political beliefs.  (53 has no real significance to anything, it’s just another random, crazy tool in your anti-terrorism survival kit.)  Every once in a while you should simply faint so that terrorists understand that you are completely nuts and are to be taken very seriously.  Hopefully, they will then come to their senses and go back to the Christian-less campground that they came from somewhere on Mars.

May I add one more level to this scenario?  Threat/Fear level Black and Blue.  This is where we don’t just sit around waiting for the terrorists to strike, peeping Toms to molest us with their eyes or boring story tellers to lull us to sleep in our own homes, but rather, we go on the offensive and bring the fight to them.  We take the fight to their cities and their dinner parties and their bushes near the windows where we get undressed at night with the curtains wide open. We terrorize them, forcing them to come up with a system that warns their citizens of impending American freedom/justice.  Only then can we declare victory in the war on terrorism, peeping Tom-ism and people who just don’t know how to tell a good story at dinner parties.

From Hippies to Hipsters: An Unwanted Collection of Humans in America

            Have you seen them? You may have. You probably have. I know you’ve seen them. Clothing that looks like it’s from the 1970’s but there’s just enough suspicion about it that you know that it’s not. Slobbish looking hairstyles that, if they could speak English, would shout, “I’m trying way too hard!”. A look about their faces that goes something like this, “I know I’m in a cool spot right now and you all are merely visitors in my cool spot, therefore, I will tolerate you for now, but I better not see you here again and you better not tell anybody about this super cool place because I don’t want it ruined by the likes of you.”

            They’re called Hipsters and they can be found in just about every major city in the United States. They are young adults who are in a state of awkward arrested development. People who are barely in their twenties and are already miss the toys and cartoons from their youth, which was only a few years prior. The one thing, however, that stands out in front of all this as a warning sign that young adults are in another pointless, directionless phase in humanity are the moustaches. Those stupid, silly moustaches. Young men who look as if they’re struggling to grow hair above their upper lip walk around the city with an unjustified confidence that seems to be beyond all reason and logic. Skinny, sickly-looking men do not need moustaches. What they need is meat on their bones, a comb and a direction in life.

            Certain guys can have a moustache that fits their lifestyle. For everyone else it just looks weird. Here are people who can have a moustache.

Cops. If you are a cop, then you can have a moustache. Especially if you shave your head. Deciding to eliminate all the hair from the top of your body except for one specific region is something that only a cop can do. Plus, there is a history between cops and moustaches in this country that only gets stronger every time they show reruns of Barney Miller or Hill Street Blues. Personally, I think the reason so many cops have moustaches is because that’s where they keep their backup gun.

            Bikers. No, not those skinny, whiny cyclists who ride for a few miles, then hang out for hours at Starbucks in their ridiculous racing gear, clopping around the store in their cycling shoes as if they’re in some Italian café and they’re training for the Tour de France. Bikers. The guys who ride those obnoxiously loud motorcycles that even deaf people can hear. They say the noise is a safety thing and that car drivers know when they’re coming up the road. Bullshit! People in Greenland know they’re coming up the road. They like the noise because they know that everyone is now focused on them and their handlebar moustache and their lame tattoos. Every time they ride their chopper is their 15 minutes of fame, played in a perpetual loop and restarted every time they start their engines.

            Dictators. It doesn’t matter what country you are oppressing, the moustache is the natural accessory to tyranny, repression and unholy domination of a frightened population of people.

            People from the 70s. Unless you have a time-machine, you need to keep the 70s look in the 70s. Ironically, most people who are fascinated by the style of the 70s weren’t even alive during that time. I was only a child, but even I knew that something had gone horrible wrong with the fashion industry. 70s clothing gets resurrected every ten years or so, but the result is always the same; embarrassment for being alive.

            So, to all the Hipsters out there in the process of growing their less than impressive moustaches, this is just a phase in your life. It will pass one day and you will look back at the photos and wonder what you were thinking, and that’s normal. We all go through silly phases and have embarrassing photos as constant proof that we all make bad decisions. But Hipsters and future trend chasers need to know this; It’s not the moustache or the clothes or the sunglasses that make you cool. It’s actually doing something interesting that makes you cool. Hopefully, it’s not too late.

            Below are some guidelines on identifying Hipsterism and steps to take if your household contracts this disease.

Q - What are the warning signs?

A - Sudden Mustache Syndrome. A need to wear 70’s or 80s style clothing that went out of style for a reason.

Q – Is there a treatment or a cure?

A – Unfortunately, no. Family and friends just need to ride out the phase like a gripping drug habit. In some cases, locking the Hipster in a room and forcing them to listen to hours of Spandau Ballet may temporarily bring the Hipster to his senses, but nothing is guaranteed.

Q – Is it contagious?

A – In some groups of people who rely on social contacts or are extremely prone to peer pressure; yes. In most other cases; no.

Q - Can Hipsterism be prevented?

A - In a word, hell no. As long as there are young adults who have been coddled from the time of birth and have been told that everything they do is great, even though they’ve done nothing, there will always be people who think that dressing exactly like each other gives them a unique individuality in life.

Q - What do you do if there is a Hipster in your family? 

A - The only thing you can do, ride it out and wait for the next fad to encompass their inconsequential lives.