Through (With) Being Cool Recently I was accused of thinking I’m ‘cool’ and that I in turn believe that deserves some type of award, primarily ‘hot women’. Which isn’t true. But it flipped a switch in the power room of my head and a constant whirring has filled me since. Most basically, what is cool? Which, the answer is, most basically, nothing.  There are few times in which I have felt Utterly and Completely Cool. These fleeting moments are nearly intangible and impossible to manufacture. The time I scored the winning goal in a soccer match (my first and only). The time someone said ‘I love you’ and wasn’t lying. The time when I wrote about a high school crush and received a gushing message days later (now that’s a bingo!). These are the times I parallel park in one try. These are accidents. Coolness is opinion. It’s what you, personally, find interesting. I find crime photography from the early 1900s completely fascinating. It is fucking cool, to me. I like black and white photographs of early Los Angeles. These two paired together are straight up boner-machines. I like how it shows a ‘simpler’ time, a specific fear that will never exist again, a fear tied solely to the frontier of modern society in the West. So when I stumbled upon a book of early 1900s homicide photography that I had been looking for for nearly a decade, I thought it was the epitome of ‘cool’. Others may find that boring. Cool to me is not cool to you. I used to think that there were a handful of universal ‘cools’. Number one being Elvis Costello. But that’s just to me and my friends and my father. A lot of you probably agree that Elvis Costello is cooler than a cucumber. But you’re my audience. And since my platform is Tumblr and you’re reading this here, then we probably have similar interests. Which is pretty cool. But somewhere some kid is at a high school party fumbling the chords to ‘Alison’ on his acoustic guitar while some other kid calls him a ‘faggot’. A cool pic of me. I thought Daniel Desario was really cool. He didn’t. Cool gets stuck in time. Things that were cool in the 80s aren’t cool today (wait a minute…). It’s not cross-generational. There are some classics, sure, like a tailored suit. Everyone likes a tailored suit. But who knows if that will always be the case. Maybe 30 years from now maybe I’ll be really into putting satellites on my dong or going to bamboo parties (which I assume is just a party where you chew on bamboo like a panda and lay on bamboo and thwack things with bamboo and sip bamboo based beverages). So let’s all breathe a little easier in our uncoolness. Earlier I said there were no universal cools. I lied. There are some. They can not be touched (and though neither could MC Hammer, he is no longer cool). These are the universal cools: friendship, love, being a human to a human, peace, honesty, tenderness, bravery, father’s holding daughters. Maybe there are more.* And I hope you feel cool when you read this because someone cares very much that you’re still breathing and somehow not one person died in the generations upon generations upon generations it took to get you here. *And Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse is universally cool.

Through (With) Being Cool

Recently I was accused of thinking I’m ‘cool’ and that I in turn believe that deserves some type of award, primarily ‘hot women’. Which isn’t true. But it flipped a switch in the power room of my head and a constant whirring has filled me since. Most basically, what is cool? Which, the answer is, most basically, nothing. 

There are few times in which I have felt Utterly and Completely Cool. These fleeting moments are nearly intangible and impossible to manufacture. The time I scored the winning goal in a soccer match (my first and only). The time someone said ‘I love you’ and wasn’t lying. The time when I wrote about a high school crush and received a gushing message days later (now that’s a bingo!). These are the times I parallel park in one try. These are accidents.

Coolness is opinion. It’s what you, personally, find interesting. I find crime photography from the early 1900s completely fascinating. It is fucking cool, to me. I like black and white photographs of early Los Angeles. These two paired together are straight up boner-machines. I like how it shows a ‘simpler’ time, a specific fear that will never exist again, a fear tied solely to the frontier of modern society in the West. So when I stumbled upon a book of early 1900s homicide photography that I had been looking for for nearly a decade, I thought it was the epitome of ‘cool’. Others may find that boring. Cool to me is not cool to you.

I used to think that there were a handful of universal ‘cools’. Number one being Elvis Costello. But that’s just to me and my friends and my father. A lot of you probably agree that Elvis Costello is cooler than a cucumber. But you’re my audience. And since my platform is Tumblr and you’re reading this here, then we probably have similar interests. Which is pretty cool. But somewhere some kid is at a high school party fumbling the chords to ‘Alison’ on his acoustic guitar while some other kid calls him a ‘faggot’.

A cool pic of me.

I thought Daniel Desario was really cool. He didn’t.

Cool gets stuck in time. Things that were cool in the 80s aren’t cool today (wait a minute…). It’s not cross-generational. There are some classics, sure, like a tailored suit. Everyone likes a tailored suit. But who knows if that will always be the case. Maybe 30 years from now maybe I’ll be really into putting satellites on my dong or going to bamboo parties (which I assume is just a party where you chew on bamboo like a panda and lay on bamboo and thwack things with bamboo and sip bamboo based beverages).

So let’s all breathe a little easier in our uncoolness.

Earlier I said there were no universal cools. I lied. There are some. They can not be touched (and though neither could MC Hammer, he is no longer cool). These are the universal cools: friendship, love, being a human to a human, peace, honesty, tenderness, bravery, father’s holding daughters. Maybe there are more.* And I hope you feel cool when you read this because someone cares very much that you’re still breathing and somehow not one person died in the generations upon generations upon generations it took to get you here.

*And Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse is universally cool.

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    THOSE CHALK BOARDS
  14. sun-smudged-peach-moon said: I was reading this on my phone in the PX while walking down an isle and a Filipino lady came up to me and told me my dress was stuck in my panties and I don’t even care and is the book called death scenes? Because that’s my favorite crime scene book
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