The reader has an implicit trust in the author.

The snow whirled aimlessly as it fell through the blustering wind on a summer’s day in Rio de Janeiro Brazil Hawaii. A tall businessman wearing a suit three sizes too small confidently strode into the conference room for what was sure to be the firm’s biggest meeting of the year. He put his coffee down with a thud onto the conference room’s conference table, which rested on the conference room floor between all the other businessmen in the conference room who showed up for the conference. There were eleven tables in the room, but they only needed four of them to fit everybody. Still, they all crowded on top of, underneath, and around the one table because it was the only possibility. Some of them laid across the tabletop all sports illustrated swimsuit style, and others gathered around its sharp edges and brushed up against each other uncomfortably, exploring the limits of their neighbors sexual boundaries with their wandering hands.

“May I have your attention, gentlemen, please,” the company’s CEO called out over the room as he unraveled his third leg and hoisted himself up above the crowd with it like jellyfish tentacles, or a fleshy jet pack, or a big pink kickstand, or a different fish. One of the businessmen stood beneath him and cranked him up as if it were a car jack for changing flat tires rather than his penis, and the CEO hovered above the room, seven feet in the air above the other men in the room who were all above him with shrunken wieners. He was planking on the pink Seattle space needle.

“Two in the fleshy salmon, one in my rotten tuna butt,” cried he to he and she, as she took him by the boy parts and handed her to his wife’s daughter’s father’s daughter.

“That’s why I take my coffee like the Ancient Greeks,” he said to her. He turned his head side to side scanning the room, a huge smile on his face, hoping that someone would acknowledge him with eye contact.

“Like the Ancient Greeks…” he repeated, clearly letting anyone who would listen know that he was setting up to make a gay joke.

“Cause they drink their coffee like gays,” he blurted out the punch line, nudging the shoulder of the man next to him who was holding his forehead in the palm of his hand to avoid eye contact. Now he’s doing yard work.

Suddenly the waitress came to their booth and asked if they were ready to order. The CEO ordered a margarita and one-fifth of a syrupy pancake stuck to the prongs of a giant fork. “If I so much as think that my pancake touched a plate, I will rub your rubber ducky with a rubber-billed I know powerful people,” said Jeff Patrick Paterson, with a familiar expression on his face that let everybody in the room know he was ready to fuck them at the drop of a hat.

The room fell silent. Six plus six equals seven. Suddenly all eyes were on Jennifer. She felt uncomfortable. She turned to the waitress, but the waitress was gone. With everyone in the room staring at her like she was growing fingers from her face, drool running down her chin, saliva smeared across her foreheads, she squeezed her eyes shut and thought of the waitress. When she opened her eyes, there she was.

The waitress broke the tension in the crowded room with some racial humor. It worked. Corduroy pepper jack! Everybody took off their shoes and put them on the table. The waitress came around and poured free Diet Coke into all their shoes and left the businessmen tips of eight francs per pound.

Inside the smoky restaurant the sun was baking the Earth’s crust and women and children turning to dust and screaming out praises to the sun god for bringing them life. A wet bunny hopped through the plush meadow and a song of happiness rang through the clear blue day of the day doo; which explains why the sun had been hoisted up near where the sun was supposed to go at night, but not by the sun spots that made the sunny briar patch on Uncle Becky’s ham shoulder. Sun.

Six buffalo later, the door exploded into the business room, and forty business conference-goers lifted the conference table up over their heads while their chief executive officers was hovering above them, balancing on his wiener like a gyroscopic kick stand. Even though the window was far too small to fit any kind of table through it, they pushed the table through the window. Then they pushed the window back through the table. Glass shattered into a bagillion empty spaces in the sky and the sturdy oaken table plummeted world trade center osama bin laden to the ground below.

The most important business meeting of the year adjourned with a loud crack as the businessmen leapt from the open window, screaming horribly as they fell and landed safely on the window washing platform exactly one story below. The platform was six inches below the window. But the window had already been pushed through the couch, which was a table’s length shorter than the table that fell trough the window, which was far too small for any sort of table to fit through it. It fell exactly 792 inches, and then nothing happened to it. Not one thing. What this was like can never be described to you because you have no psychological reference point for what complete nothingness would look like. You can never know what it was like when nothing happened to the furniture. You are a dick.

THE ERNB

The Worst Story I Could Come Up With Last Night

It was a cold day at the North Pole, and Santa’s elves were slaving away tirelessly in a region of Earth with no standard minimum wage.

An elf named Dingle took an unauthorized break from his work. He put on his thick winter coat and he went outside into the wailing wind of the arctic winter. Dingle followed a set of reindeer tracks in the snow. They took him through a trail in the region’s magical non-existent woods. At the end of the trail was Santa’s gingerbread house. There was a fire inside and smoke rising up from the chimney. Santa Claus was inside rocking back and forth on his rocking chair, which was turned away from the window so that dingle could only see the back of him. He must have been working really hard to knit a sweat or a scarf or something, because his right elbow was crooked out, and it was shaking back and forth really fast like he was working on something with his hand and he only had so much time left to finish it so he was rushing.

Then Santa’s chair stopped rocking and he sunk into it and lay still.

Three years later, Santa was going down the chimney of a little girl who had two moms who both only tolerated her. 

“Oh my goodness!” the girl said to Santa Claus. 

“Hey now, don’t make me put my rings back on,” Santa replied, ready to cut loose on that trifling little girl.

“Thank you so much, Wonderbread. You’re a straight G,” said the seven-foot tall girl with six pigtails, none of which were on her head, as Santa Claus handed her a candy cane the size of a candy cane. She slid the candy cane into her ear hole and it almost disappeared, except for the handle of the candy cane, which stuck out her ear hole looking like some kind of thing of some sort. Like a handle.

Santa climbed into his sleigh and sat straight up. He looked down at his feet. That’s when he noticed a spot on his boot. So Santa went into his magical bag of presents, filled with every toy that a little boy or girl could ever imagine, and he pulled out an old gray tooth brush. 

“A Tooth brush,” Santa grinned. “More like a nooth grush.” Santa laughed at his own joke for three full minutes before turning to the girl with a smile and taking his hand out of his pants.

The tooth brush had been heavily used before Santa found it at the bus station. The bristles were frayed and it smelled like a cat. Santa slumped over his big wide belly and scrubbed the scuffmark out of his boot with the old tooth brush. Then he pulled his feet together so his boots were almost touching. Then he made them touch each other. Santa looked at the way his feet were touching each other and decided it would be better if he moved the apart.
Santa moved his feet apart. He called Rudolph over to his sleigh. Rudolph’s nose lit up. Santa took a magic electric shaving razor out of his pocket and he plugged the cord into Rudolph’s bright red boy pussy. Santa shaved his beard,letting the long gray hairs fall into his pants as he stretched out the waistband as far as it could go so that the most hairs would fall into his pants. This process took hours.

The reindeer neighed and whinnied, and they called out other animal sounds that seemed to Santa like sounds made by species outside of the reindeer family. Santa barked and mooed, but the reindeer did not answer him. So Santa emptied the hair from his pants onto the reindeer’s antlers, sprinkling it on like some kind of thing that happens.

THE ERND

Social Loafing and the Insidious Damage Inflicted on Society by Those Who Grow Ironic Moustaches

Introduction:

In her article entitled “How to Live Without Irony" in The Opinion Pages of The New York Times, Christy Wampole addresses the growing epidemic of detached irony among the generational group known as Millennials. She describes the many shortcomings of the overvaluation of the ironic wit of hipsters –particularly the lack of social and cultural identity brought about by habitual indecisiveness. Wampole argues, that hipsters are a manifestation of the Millennials by and large, that because Millenials resort to using irony as a defense mechanism implemented to avoid the vulnerability that accompanies frankness, they undermine themselves by avoiding confrontation and potential embarrassment. They identify with the absence of identification. This reluctance to produce original thought is where my critical essay takes roots. I will extend Wampole’s ascertations about Millennials to the social psychological concept of social loafing.

Main Body:

Part of what characterizes active participation in modern American society is an individual’s expression of personal agency. There are times, such as when engaging in a debate with a person of opposing values, when life demands a person to be frank and decisive, to express what one feels in spite of the possibility of being embarrassed by advocating the side of the argument that loses. Wampole argues that Millenials, on the other hand, avoid this necessary risk. They make a lifestyle of detached irony. What is problematic about existing in a perpetual state of ironic comments and the valuation of the absurd over that which is representative of one’s actual interests, is that it requires the individual to convey nothing genuine about themselves; rather, it encourages one to become social loafers by merely adopting the culture of others, while masquerading as being inventive, in order to avoid the accountability for one’s actions that would normally accompany an expression of serious and sincere thought.

Wampole describes hipsters as an offshoot of the Millennial generation –the most extreme case of the ordinary member of this generational group (1). She professes that this epidemic of irony is a “provisional answer to the problems of too much comfort, too much history, and too many choices” (Wampole 1) It is feasible that increased accessibility to digital stimuli, combined with lack of face-to-face communication and hyper-exposure to out-group cultural resources, has led to the deindividuation of the Millenials. If it is a normal standard of human existence to achieve a degree of personal identity through that with which the individual associates himself or herself, then these hipster Millennials, caught up in the sensationalized alter-egos that they have adopted, have relegated themselves to the sidelines by proving to be reluctant to commit to the objects and attitudes with which they adorn frivolously.

Arguably, hipsters are the incarnation of the rebel with no cause. It can be said that they have no distinct culture, and that they instead borrow from elsewhere. This habitual social borrowing, when not reciprocated via the contribution of unique cultural output, is a one-way street. This amounts to a black hole through which the historical idiosyncrasies and creativity of other groups is compressed into effectively nothing by the destructive force of these trifling hipsters. This is roughly equivalent to non-Mexican persons dressing as a giant taco wearing a sombrero for Halloween, as it involves the reduction of of other cultures for the sake of a person’s amusement.  

The prototypical hipster’s aloof and ironic semblance of an actual standpoint is for them means of social conveyance intended to communicate the individual’s value to other members of their group. It is precisely this bizarre attempt at cultivating social attachments through their own personal detachment that epitomizes their lackluster participation in society. The is a disconnection in these Millennials from the person as observer and the person as agent that makes this behavior so problematic. They simply acknowledge that events, such as great historical cultures, have existed, without being directly effected by them aside from the experiences of their own choosing. It is because they have not suffered or endured hardship that these hipsters are able to coyly dabble in relics of civilization that others have already payed for.  Wampole asserts that "for the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime. He doesn’t own anything he possesses" (1).

Hipsters are reluctant to express themselves honestly and candidly, because they are afraid of being wrong. Instead of approaching culture and the world from the vantage of self-asserting critical thinkers, they behave like “walking citations…[who try] to negotiate the age-old problem of individuality not with concepts, but with material things,” or social cop-outs, in the case of many (Wamploe 1).

Hipster Millennials perceive their behavior as if it is radical or unprecedented, although they are actually lazy, and are freeloading off of the hard work and brilliance of other cultures. Perhaps they are violating the social convention of taking oneself seriously, but, probably to their chagrin, this plays a hand in rendering them slaves to idleness and complacency. By refusing to choose a stance and defend it, they are allowing themselves to be dragged across the floor on the coattails of ideas that others advented, while being suffocated in a dust cloud of vague banality. From their coattail perch, the world rolls past them in two dimensions like the rotating backdrop images used to film scenes which take place inside of vehicles in Hollywood back in the 1920’s (The irony of this reference is not lost on me). They are not actually engaging with or understanding the manifold flags that they wave. Instead, from behind a barrier of detachment that is induced by existing within the relative safety of non-identification and inaction, they treat the cultures of places and times far removed from themselves as novelties or extravagances, as cocktail dresses to be worn once to a party and then returned at a later date at their convenience with the price tags still intact. It is in this regard that Millennial hipsters socially loaf, subsisting on the accomplishments of others.

  

Works cited:

Wampole, Christy. "How to Live Without Irony." The New York Times 7 Nov. 2012, opinion ed. Web. 27 Oct. 2015. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/?_r=0>.