The New Boredom

I used to watch Beavis and Butthead when I was a little kid even though my folks weren’t really okay with it. These are the smae parents that took me to go see Pulp Fiction and Fargo in theaters when I was like 9 or 10 years old. I recently re-watched some of the Beavis and Butthead episodes on borrowed dvd collections from a friend. One thing I noticed among all the fart and boner jokes was this uncanny perspective that Mike Judge had of the world at the time and has continued to display in select King of the Hill episodes and Office Space and Idiocracy. Many people initially dismissed his first show as little more than being about two stupid kids and their antics. But if they gave the show a chance they would see that the show had its fingers on the pulse of our society, revealing the ugly truths of our times.

One of these harsh realities is the portrayal of adult characters within the show. They were unable to provide these two stupid kids with any kind of solid roll models often ending up right by their side in the closing scene of each episode, laughing with that same inane chuckle, completely surrendering their authority in this world in favor of a state of perpetually arrested development.

So what does that have to do with The New Boredom? I dont know. But this silly blog will reach 100 entries with this post, and that makes it a long lasting blog according to some stats that I read recently. A huge chunk of all blogs are started and abandonded within 5 posts. I know that Phactory Phillis Wheeler contributed to this on a few occasions.

So what have my 100 posts been about? Other than promissing you guys more writers to provide a wider range of material and never really delivering on that (come on “contributors”, where are you?), I’ve gone off about the bike industry a couple times, dorked out about design a few times, ranted or raved about some movies and music, and shared some video clips that I found pretty interesting. My blog has the focus of an air horn. In retrospect, it seems like this blog gets a handful of readers every day that are people I probably already know and this is just a centralized place for me to show them nifty shit that I find on the web. I’m obviously a long ways off from writing anything professionally or making anything of myself with this stuff.

So here’s a story that has something to do with the Beavis and Butthead stuff I mentioned earlier.

I used to work for a now defunct bike shop called Bicycle Werx and mostly worked in the service department where I would weasel people out of entirely too much money to change their flat tires so that the shop could stay in business for another twelve seconds. I had this manager named Nate. He was a nice guy and mostly just loved bikes. I don’t think he had any dreams or aspirations of being anything more than a good bike mechanic in his life and I honestly admired that. As a teenager with a lot of pressure on me to figure out my future, it was nice to see some one happy to be at work doing something modest and simple like making people’s bikes work better. It as good to see him take pride in a job that some people would foolishly look down on.

So he seemed like an okay roll model or something like that at the time, just like the authority figures in Beavis and Butthead. But then one night, Nate went out and did a little too much drinking. It was winter and it had started snowing that evening and when Nate left the bars, he saw the conditions and decided he didnt want to ride his bike home in that mess. He didnt have a car so obviously the next best solution was not to call a cab but rather to hijack a city trash truck and procceed to drive it straight into a parked cop car on the way home. The way I hear the story, he woke up the next morning in jail and got a new job with the state making license plates for the next few years.

I havent heard anything about Nate since then but I hope he’s doing well. I’d like to think that he’s off somewhere turning wrenches on bikes again but if the Beavis and Butthead model holds up- well, who knows.

Anyways, here’s to another hundred aimless and wandering posts on The New Boredom. Coming up soon will be some more Deal Breakers, I’m Sorry For:’s and Top 5’s, as well as some other less planned rambling about nothing particularly important.