Macho Talk

I know none of you remember when I blogged long ago about Ari wearing a tutu and making out with boys. Sigh. I miss those days. Now he does this thing when he is "playing" by himself where he makes laser gun noises and flails his fists in an aggressive manner. He also has conversations with himself, taking both the good and bad guy roles. I think of them as macho talk, and they usually go something like this:

Good guy: You are a bad guy!! I wanna kill you hard!
Bad guy: (laughing evilly) Never! I won't die! I will kill you two times first!
Good guy: Oh, yeah? Well I have a super-sonic, enormous gun that shoots really big ginormous bullets at your head!

Then there's a pause in the discussion for laser fire sound effects and hyper gesticulations communicating same.
Pow pow crash zoom etc., done with some kind of pre-school type beat boxing I'd be impressed by, were it not for the atrocious violence.
Then, it's back to the original conflict.

Bad guy: I am a very bad guy. I don't even listen to anybody at all.
Good guy: Well, you better listen to me, buddy. Because I'm about to kill you and kill you! And then I will make you listen!
Bad guy: Well, if you kill me I can't listen because I'm dead! (I swear to god he said this. The logic on that boy!)
Good guy: I'm going to kill you anyway!
Bad guy: (with many flying bullet sounds) I'll kill you more because I have bigger bullets.

And so on.

How did this happen? I do not know.

While we are on this topic, allow me to address the related topic of quirky-coolness. What is that? Well, pretty much the opposite of big guns. Or that is what the quirky-coolsters would like you to think! But I beg to differ. Exhibit A: knitting. Somebody in Portland or Providence twenty years ago decided it would be a good idea to be quirky. So they chose the thing nobody actually has any interest in at all and pretended to be riveted by it. This thing at the time was knitting. Now it is food trucks. Long ago it was throwing pots. Somewhere along the line it became quinoa. If I had a disgusting vegetable with a crazy name, preferably with at least one silent letter, such as "pbkitqua" (pronounced "kit-qua") I could make a zillion bajillion dollars from the hipsters selling its seeds. Bonus cash if it's impossible to harvest except in third-world countries, takes more than two hours to prepare, and/or has some bizarre alternative purpose, such as toothpaste preservative. So anyway, the quirky-coolsters like to pretend they are not macho. They like to think that their little obsessions are not oppressive and that all of us have secretly wanted to grow pbkitqua all of our lives. They want us to think they are freeing us. But: I feel oppressed. Because I have no interest in any of it, and I refuse to pretend I do. Take that, bitches!

There is a retail establishment in my neighborhood that sells coffee which closed recently and another that sells yarn that put up a fancy, expensive new storefront. The second place is so quirky it has, in its name, a subtitle. It is called: Wool Winders: A Knitting Salon. This place is evidently flourishing. It's been here for years and years, but the coffee place closed down. Wtf, people? Are you all secretly buying yarn from my neighborhood? If so, stop it! Or at least buy some coffee, too. Oh, whoops! Too late. Coffee place out of business. No coffee for you.

My other thinking is that Wool Winders: A Knitting Salon has a side business. Specifically, I think they sell crack, heroin, and crystal meth. Or maybe just Sudafed. But without making you show your license! Now, normally I would not care, but I miss my coffee place. And I know there is only so much drug trade a neighborhood can support. So I think Wool Winders: A Knitting Salon must have taken some underground business away from my coffee place. What do you think? Nobody can be selling just yarn and coffee! Not in this economy.