Get Off My Lawn

So somewhere between my Questlove post and my Failure post, this blog had visitors from at least 8 countries, most of which I’ve never even been to.  Which I suppose is kind of cool in a way, but also kind of depressing, because they wouldn’t have read anything here to change their views on how stupid Americans can be sometimes. 

So that happened, but then I also started having followers.  I guess you don’t know whether or not that’s creepy or cool until you find out who they are.

Some of them were people I already knew, and some of them were this guy.   Now granted, this was before I published the failure post so maybe he’s just a big Jimmy Fallon fan or something.  But that went up on Friday and he’s still following me, so whatever it means to follow someone’s blog apparently it doesn’t mean getting the general hint that you have to be this tall to get on the ride. 

If you are this guy, know this guy, or want to be this guy, then I’m not going to say anything in my blog that you need to hear.

Why you ask?  Well, just imagine this guy showing up at your party.  Not a party, it’s obvious that is something that he thinks he’s skilled at, but your party.  Whether it’s your kid’s birthday or just hanging out with some friends, do you really want this guy there?  If the answer is yes, well then maybe this is not for you either.  If the answer is no, well then just realize that this blog is sort of like my party.  I may have even invited you to it.

MTV’s The Real World is older than this guy.  (I had to check Wikipedia to find out if it was still around).  And apparently that show was the inspiration for his entire career trajectory.  When The Real Word first came out, they had a name for people with such aspirations: Slackers.  In fact, you got that name even if you chose to aim a little higher, like graduating from college and getting a job. 

This guy, and guys like him, are building their entire careers on an infrastructure that was created by the sorts of people I’d like to show up at my party.  The sorts of people whose yearly incomes over the past two decades have vacillated between six and four figures.  If you made a graph of their earnings over that time period it might resemble a damped harmonic oscillator more than anything.  I met that sort of a guy at a party once.  He told me to buy this antivirus software from Iceland because it’s the only one he could never hack.  And that meant something to me.  Watching 20 year olds in a hot tub: really doesn’t.

Now to be symmetrical, I should probably talk about why I don’t want some Baby Boomer following my blog either, but they haven’t shown up yet.  Apparently their kid took off for Thailand before showing them how that app worked.