Though the experience of traversing the great states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with this past Memorial Day Weekend for my sister’s college graduation was
quite edifying*, my fears that evil is all around are far from quashed:

Incident #1: Super K-Mart, DuBois (pronounced DOO-BOYZ), PA, 5/27, circa 4PM

Having grown up in the city as well, my parents have a fascination with strip malls, superstores, family-themed restaurants, and gas stations generally reserved for tourists experiencing Times Square, The Eiffel Tower, and the Hoover Dam. Naturally, our trip included stops to Wal-Mart, Denny’s, Applebees, Loews, to name but a few.

One stop at a Super K-Mart in western Pennsylvania began simply enough: my parents exploring the isles for deals unheard of in New York while Jayme and I amused ourselves by reading the nutritional information on a box of Chef Boyardee Five Cheese Ravioli Deep Dish Meal (illustrated below) Also, we laughed some at a Jeff Gordon Stein/Mug/Shot Glass collection:

When Jayme decided to use the bathroom, I took it upon myself to check out the slim pickings at the electronics department. No sooner had I found some video game accessories that grabbed my attention, was I approached by a husky, surly, lazy eyed gentleman in a football Jersey. The exchange went like this:

Dude: Hey.
I glance over. I am dressed quite conservatively and don’t stick out. I don’t deserve a beating right now.
Me: …hey.
I return my gaze to the item I am looking at. Dude crosses through the aisle.
Dude: You do sports?
I know I’m looking particularly good today, but I don’t want to talk to this hillbilly. At all. Not even about my dabblings in soccer, baseball, and the occasional drunken mini golf expulsion.
Me: …no.
Dude: Never did no boxing? Nothing like that?
Me: …nope.
Dude: Never fought with your brothers? Little tussle?
Me: …no brothers.
I probably said more that I should have, but it’s too late for that kind of thinking.
Dude: Fight with your friends, maybe?

At this point, I’m not really sure at all what this guy is going for. Does he want to fight me? If so, I may have to take advantage of all the blunt objects a Super K-Mart has
to offer; though my cunning has saved me over mere brute force in the past, this husky, surly, lazy eyed gentleman has access to all the same stuff. Or is it sexual? Is he
the only gay man in DuBois, PA and his only plan on scoring some ass is to skulk around the local K-Mart employing the Socratic method of extracting the ultimate
information (”is this guy also gay”) by posing smaller questions (”do you like to fight with men for fun?” which, as we all know now, was a dead end in his line of
questioning)? Would the next question have been - had I answered “yes, hillbilly, I LOVE to fight!” - “would you like to fight me, naked, in a wading pool filled with
pudding? This afternoon?” Maybe he was in art school, and his latest project was to recreate an ancient Greek Urn, and he needed some nude Greco-Roman wrastlin’
models for the etchings on the side.

Or maybe he was just retarded.

Incident #2: Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, 5/28, circa 5PM

Perhaps this is more of an observation that aggravated me, Jayme, and my entire family into shaking rage than a standout event, so if the first part of this entry did it for you, you should probably stop reading now.

Most of you know that I attended Bard College, a relatively progressive liberal arts school up the river; Bard was certainly no stranger to absolute bullshit, baloney art, and fake eccentrics. Now while I am not surprised in the least that the same archetypes existed at my sister’s liberal arts college, I was expecting perhaps a different brand of douchebag (a Mr. Pibb to Bard’s Dr. Pepper, so to speak), and not the publicly masturbating bat shit insane assholes I saw at Oberlin.

It’s not school pride. These dudes/babes were far worse than anything I’ve ever seen.

Liberal arts schools generally attract the wealthy offspring of ex-hippies; children who are convinced that they are art and that the shit that they’re doing has never been done before. Wrinkly old ex-hippie professors manage to encourage, rather than stifle this sort of behavior. Take a trip to Sarah Lawrence, Vassar, Bard, Oberlin, Wesleyan, Trinity, or any liberal arts school and you’ll meet some of these stereotypes:

- The slam poet go-getter. He feels the soul of the ghetto with his bad poetry, written in white ink on black paper. He also organizes the weekly open mic at the school-funded coffee house (or dining hall depended on the school’s budget). When he graduates, he will call you - repeatedly - to try and get you to put a project into his arts showcase. Fortunately, no one will come, and he will be forced to bury his dream and get a job at Starbuck’s, where his suggestions to have an open mic are repeatedly shot down by upper management.

- Hat-guy (or girl). You don’t know who he is, your friends don’t know who he is, but hell, you see him all over campus several times a day. This guy is defined by his fedora hat, cause no one else wears one! The hat manages to detract from what is a truly homely visage, and likely a banal personality. Hat-guy generally travels with ugly-girl and hawaiian-shirt-guy.

- Is she from India?! And the answer is no - she’s actually from Bethesda, MD with no ancestry hailing from southern Asia or parts proximate but she wears a traditional sari and has enough gold things wrapped around her to make Gwen Stefani look like THX-1138.

- Art-Dick. He has no discernible talent, but he manages to burrow his way into a very loud presence at the art or film department. While not one of his pieces makes a modicum of sense, has any meaning, could entertain no one, the sheer volume of his oeuvre is in itself, quite impressive. Art-Dick preys upon other people’s fear of appearing stupid to propagate his “craft”: no one wants to admit to failing to comprehend Art-Dick’s work, and thus he is showered with undeserved praise. Art-Dick is a near cousin to Andy-Dick.

- Emo-Cunts. Generally hard to find but easy to identify due to their inherent social anxiety and riveted vinyl belts, respectively, Emo-Cunts often travel in packs of four or more (because inevitably they will form an emo band). They are prone to similar modes of dress, significant others that could pass for their twins, and hairstyles that Rod Stewart and Ron Wood pioneered by simply having bad hair. Emo-Cunts have diminished senses of humor because they have just spent the last night with their kind crying at a Belle and Sabastian concert. They will live on Bedford Avenue after graduation and make you a mix tape that you will find unlistenable.

So those are a few of your typical liberal-arts students, that I am, and I’m sure that most of you are used to. While at Oberlin, I saw plenty of these people, but nothing quite like an all new creature I had discovered: Musician-Fuck.

I actually saw three of them, even though one was enough to make me feel as if I were an archeologist unearthing the bones of a long-saught missing link.

My sister invited us to attend a dance department performance a couple of days before graduation; that prospect in itself sent shivers down my spine. The first performance consisted of a dude with some drums and a chick dancing awkwardly. It soon was apparent that this dance was not choreographed, and was in fact being improvised on the spot. This is fine - in theory - but this guy couldn’t play drums. Shit, I don’t play drums, nor Donkey Konga for Gamecube, but I am quite confident that I would beat this guy silly in a game of Donkey Konga. The girl looked stupid, as she had no talent either, but the moron with the Elvis Costello glasses and the two-inch forehead pounding legitimate instruments like a retarded toddler with no hands barreling into a housewares display at Bed Bath & Beyond looked far worse.

That’s bad, I thought. But it wasn’t over.

After a couple of rather boring but pedestrian dance numbers, we were treated to another improvisational routine. This time, it was a new couple. It could only be better than the first one, I thought. A gangly dread-locked dude whipped out a clarinet and began to blow. Airy, awkward squeaks blasted forth as another stupid girl looked at her hands with one leg cocked at a ninety-degree angle. It was clear this team was far more talentless than our previous winner. Much like the aforementioned Art-Dick, dread-locked-clarinet-dude managed to make his bad playing resemble something else, so that anyone who doesn’t know what a clarinet should really sound like would be baffled to the point where clapping at the piece’s termination was probably the only option.

My blood began to boil. Is that what they teach kids at this school? You don’t need talent! Just as long as you express yourself! I could just see this asshole, performing
his ode to complete mediocrity and then meeting some dirty chick at a party that night.

“You like music?”
“Yeah”
“I play music”

And then he coerces her into a night of bland, uncompelling sex.

And if seeing two members of this new classification of being weren’t enough, there was a third. The next day, walking past houses, another dread-locked moron sat on his porch blowing flat notes through a trumpet.

“I fucking hate that guy,” my sister said. “I was his R.A. sophomore year. You think he sounds bad now? You should have heard him then. He played that thing all the
time. Still does. Smells really bad too.”

“Interesting,” I responded.

Five minutes later, I was on the phone to the museum. I had discovered this missing link…

*note to Stefan and Gareth: though I’m sure you’ve already thought about this, if you beat the shit-snot out of some punk, and you’re standing over his listless, broken
heap of a body - and feel that the violence needs a Schwarzeneggeresque punctuation - you should say in a low, confident tone, “You’ve been…Edelfied.”

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