The Bucket Brigade

I worry that our positions--that is to say, the social spaces we occupy--sometimes dictate our responses to things rather than our actual, genuine reactions on an emotional level. Like you spend several years very carefully cultivating an image of the Party Redneck. You know, flannel shirt sans sleeves and inoperable front-buttons, exclusive diet of domestic beer and Smokehouse Barbecue Ruffles (because Hickory Barbecue Wavy Lays are for country club homosexuals), refuse to go to any party that included a drinking receptacle made of glass, and maybe you're even the last person you know doing the hard work to keep "fuckin' A!" alive as a relevant exclamatory. Now imagine you're hanging out with your lib-tard bleeding heart disgrace of a sister and in her car you hear "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" by Edith Piaf for the first time and you want to gasp because it hits your parched and cracked soul like the first drop of something you never even knew it was possible to thirst for, but now would die, desiccated and brittle as a moth's wing, if you couldn't find it and everything like it again, soon and often.

But you can't say that, you can't do that, because of who you have elected to be. Not just the shit you would take from admitting to the deep and sustaining nourishment you receive from a song without an Allen Collins guitar solo anywhere in it, but what about the grievous, maybe irreparable, damage to the fabric of the small social quilt that covers all of your and your neighbors' most intimate parts? It's not the embarrassment of challenging other people's perceptions of you, it's the great, enduring good of the objectively terrible society you're part of that needs to be defended. Guys who like things that are a) pretty, b) French and c) unaccompaniable by a fist-pump and a "Woo!" don't last long where you live. They're chased out, usually by themselves on their way to college.

It's a tricky place to be, especially because Edith Piaf is really, really good. I can say that because I already went to college and because by most redneck standards, I qualify as a woman. Remind me to post pictures of my souffles sometime.

No, what I've done is presented, over and over again, the image of the distant, observing, judging, self-appointed, over-educated social critic whose primary function is to hunt out earnestness and sincerity anywhere in the world and expose it as shallow attention-whoring, usually by making some kind of pseudo-intellectual or quasi-scientific appeal to Marx or Darwin and, simultaneously, a dismissive jerk-off motion with one or both my fists. I avoid feelings because feelings are what they do on Fox News. Feelings are the unthinking engine that drives the ballistic missile of Colbertian truthiness dudes like me are trying to defend against, all the time full aware of the fruitless waste of energy the task will prove to be because, when you come down to it, nothing is more fun than mindless outrage. Except maybe oxycontin. But I'm guessing with the Fox News crowd, those two spheres aren't mutually exclusive.*

So because of my well-established, self-appointed position in this, the fragile clockwork of my ticking social circle, I should by all rights be agitated as shit about this goddamned ice-bucket challenge thing. It doesn't actually do anything material, unless you're Charlie Sheen apparently. And it's a truism that if Charlie Sheen is your moral barometer, something is askew.

The snark is out there. I've seen all the cues I should take to sharpen the knife and stick it in, but I don't know... Is it wrong that I find it slightly charming? Maybe I'm getting old. Yes, it's shallow, it's idiotically trendy and most of the people involved can't reliably spell ALS, but how do you measure awareness anyway? Maybe you do it by the number of dumb videos that exist with people dumping water on their heads. If the internet gives us nothing else, it's metrics. Measurables. This many people can be moved to do something pointless and showy. Maybe next time they can be moved to do something else.

All that said, it's still funny to watch people do it wrong.

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*Zing!!!!! OK, I'm done with the commentary.