clinging to the 80s like it's a sickly infant

I have, at various points in my life, been sucked into a few fashion trends. As a little kid, I had a rat tail for a while, and when I was in second grade, I owned a couple pairs of hammer pants. That being said, I can't muster up the tolerance required in order to not despise most of my fellow men (and women) in Utah. The reason is this. In this rest of the United States, when a fad comes and goes, it comes and then it goes. In Utah, they have a problem with that last part. In fact, it seems like their method is they scan each 12-month period for the most ludicrous and hideous styles and fashions and cling to them with the a grip comparable only to the locked jaw of a pit bull. Also, with the same keen eye with which they spot the current trends which will most embarrass them in retrospect, they scan the annals of history (and by "history" I mean "the last 20 years") and locate equally nauseating fashions and art in which they then become fully invested.

Among the many, many moronic things on this list of Utard fads are:

• mustaches
  
• mullets
• geometric-patterned clothing
• men spending as much on their hair as women
• emo music/fashion
• bleaching their hair white, a la Ric Flair
• claiming to like The Cure
• The Cure
• clashing neon-colors all crammed onto solitary articles of clothing
• neon colors on anything at all
• denim used for anything but pants
  and probably my most hated of all...
• wearing pants that are 2 sizes too small... AND THEN SAGGING THEM.

I distinctly remember the fad of JNCO jeans. They were so baggy, you could have been smuggling babies, and nobody would have known. Yes, it was a stupid fad, but at least when pants were that baggy, it made sense, physically, that one's pants would sag. They were too big! Of course they'd sag! They would do it on their own without any help from the putz wearing them. But what I don't understand is why some clown with 17 facial hairs (all 17 of which grown out to look strategically messy and unkempt) who obviously bought his jeans from the Women's section of Express, is sagging his skin-tight denim halfway down his bony butt giving everyone within several hundred feet a clear view of his American Apparel boxer-briefs. Sagging, as a style, began as a natural byproduct of the size of the pants. This new breed of androgynous freaks goes out of its way to intentionally push the waistband of their sprayed-on denim down far enough that we have to rename certain anatomical components "public parts."

I've said this many times and I'll say it again now, and probably many more times to come: The 1980s was a wasteland of fashion and culture. Now, I'm the first to admit that a lot of cool developments in music and the arts happened during the 80s, such as punk rock, hip-hop, and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, but the great things that happened in these fields happened in spite of the decade in which they occurred. The general zeitgeist of the 1980s does not reflect the cool things, like Bad Religion's album, Suffer, that occurred. Their simultaneity is merely coincidence. And I'll give you one guess which one of these two camps of culture the average Utard gleans from the 1980s and then clings to. I'll give you one guess: I don't meet any Brian Eno fans or hear any local bands playing covers of "You Are the Government" by Bad Religion. What I do run into a lot is people at the local water park wearing gray swim trunks with superimposed pink and purple geometric patterns, whilst sporting perms and mustaches. I could just vomit.

I understand that temporary, humorous revivals of 1980s fashions that the nation is embarrassed to remember have been going on at the national level, but each is short-lived and mostly for novelty purposed. Most people get the idea that it's supposed to be funny and that the joke gets old after a couple weeks. Not so in Utah. Like previously explained, they locate the most ridiculous trend they can find and then cling to it indefinitely. Many of them will probably claim that they're in on the joke and are doing it to be funny. But when 93% of your wardrobe is part the joke, that makes you a living, breathing joke. At that point, you have forfeited any claim you had on being taken seriously by anyone on any subject. I don't associate with rodeo clowns.

For a perfect example of the goofballs in which I seem to be immersed, here is a picture I took of some ludicrous hipster that was crossing the street in front of Wifey and me the other day:

Something my mom always said about these kinds of ridiculous fads is, "If his mother had told him that he had to wear that, he'd have cried his eyes out." I mean, are you looking at the same picture as me? His pants are so tight that you can see the inner workings of his circulatory system. Do I even need to MENTION his shoes? It would be superfluous. They mock themselves by virtue of existing.

Come on, April 2010.....