the fun begins when said asshole claims to not be stereotyping. things come full circle in the comments, with the lovin’ spoonful of human generosity only found online:
Yeah, see, the reason women hang out with gay men is because it gives them a break from dealing with guys who are so desperate to get into a woman’s pants that that they’d actually formulate a plan to totally use someone and pretend to want to be friends with them—without actually caring about them at all—just to hit on their female friends.
My Lord. Guys like you make us wish we were gay.
poor thing never got it.
loren feldman, it’s too bad you make it a point to offend as many as possible after you make half of a point. the rest of the point might be interesting.
might be.
so, i think a lot of american small towns are redundant and shouldn’t exist.
i’m saying this upon a visit to hollywood florida where the local moneymaker is tourism. almost everything in this town seems to be imported from somewhere else, and the regional skillset has atrophied to pretty much nothing. there’s call for unskilled help in restaurants and bars, but not much beyond that.
the level of culture on display is bottom of the barrel, catering to tourists, and at a level that indicates that they’re struggling to do that. last night we had dinner at a restaurant which managed to make the simplest things flavorless. mozzarella with no tang, blackened fish which was just burnt, and a margarita lacking the warm undercurrents of a good tequila. all of those things point to a voyeuristic experience with “what’s supposed to be done.”
three times i’ve asked for an americano at a coffee bar, and been handed a cup of burnt drip coffee. i can see how that leap would be made, considering an americano’s origins as “the american version of coffee. but, i mean, come on. it’s not hard to figure out how to do things the correct way.
the businesses here are ridiculously polarized. they’re either massive regional or national chains on one end, or pathetic local entertainment venues on the other. the national chains seem to supply durable goods, regionals supply grocery goods, and local supply the court jester factor: entertainment, or whatever passes for it.
this town in particular seems to be the glittering child of twentieth century culture—unable to exist without a constant supply of imported goods from another climate. my impression of the century we’ve just completed is that western culture thought humanity could (and should) do whatever thy want at the lowest price point available. so the value chain becomes inverted: things we see cheap and valueless in places like hollywood are the things which should be of highest value: coffee, sugar, dairy. things which are valueless, like the local taste in art, are vaulted as a things we should cherish despite a clear lack of quality. our current flavor of ultra-inclusionary culture has made the notion of taste unpopular, but the truth is: without some baseline standard, one become a styleless hick aping the genteel.
so my question is this. as we move our culture forward to a position in which we’re not overfarming, underpaying, and relying upon transportation which decimates the atmosphere—do places like hollywood florida continue to exist? what happens to bubble towns like this with no real skills? do they fade away? it’s a disturbing question, and one which haunts me lately. i’m not hearing the question of realistic sustenance asked in the media—only an assumption that we’re going to continue with our lives as we have, only somehow different. but… how different? and with that difference, who gets to live?
