How to be Kedar

I once thought up a short story of a dark, mechanical city of faceless people. four of the wisest leave the city in search of something more… but they are all disappointed in some way. I don’t remember the story very well. one person travels upstream a river. He comes across the source of the river. A great wall of melting ice and encased in the ice is the greatest people in world history standing like mighty giants. even Jesus is there frozen in the ice, and in his place there is the crack where the water flows into a river. the river is his own tears.

I’ll explain what the allegory represents. The people are faceless and nameless because they lost their individuality. The city is dark and mechanical because humankind has destroyed the light and flora of nature. The wise men leave the city to rediscover themselves, their human heritage. The great people in the wall of ice represents the immortality of their legacy. The melting ice and the river represent that the legacy is decaying. Jesus is crying because humanity has completely lost its way.

people these days are really fake. really, really fake. so fake that it exercises my gag reflexes.

I call it the cult of fakeness (I just now made up that name). It seems to have consumed my generation.

Having the latest gadget does not make you cool. I have a dell laptop that was at the end of its product cycle two years ago. It has minimal features. It is reliable. But there are people who say, “Hey, why’re you carrying around that dinosaur?” Those are the people who have trendy bags for their slick macbooks. But I’m an expert coder. I have the best software. I’m dual boot with Linux, fluent in both. My laptop is fast because I cut the fat. In my mind, it is the skill that is more important than the tool. Functionality over form. But the cult of fakery is all about the latest – and we can see why that is stupid, because windows vista sucks, the iPhone is extremely overrated (in my opinion), and the reception of the ps3 has been slow on the uptake.

I don’t buy video game consoles. I play snes and n64 roms – I have for the last decade or so. When people see me, they are shocked. Of course I play modern games when I’m with my friends, but I enjoy playing older games in my free time. Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s bad. That’s another thing about the cult of fakery – it’s all about grabbing the new and throwing out the old. It’s a culture of waste.

Kids that I’ve known from a young age are suddenly black wannabes – flashing gang signs, talking in mock-ebonics calling me a nigga and girls shawty, dressing to be fly. They crash the clubs every weekend (the scene is hot in Austin), rolling in gangs of other wannabe niggas and checking out women like they were meat. When one rap song gets hot, everybody listens to it all the time. Then they crunk and grind and drink and brag about it afterwards.

And girls are more shallow than ever. What you see on facebook is not what you get in real life. Photos of scantily-clad girls and their girlfriends making pouty faces, seductive poses. When I talk to one of these girls, all they care about is dancing, drinking, and having sex. Not that any of those things are bad, but to make that the central purpose of your lifestyle? Girls are all about fashion, about pretending to be someone else.

Entertainment news. The paparazzi catches a once-in-a-lifetime topless or crotch shot. Celebrity couples get together. Then they break up. They have babies. They give the baby an odd name. They go to prison. They follow a strange religion. They say something about someone. They die. They release sex videotapes. They help people in Africa. They did something stupid when they were drunk. They go to rehab for taking drugs.

And the cult of fakeness follows this 24-hour news coverage, if not on tv then in magazines. Then they gossip about it non-stop. It becomes the subject of conversation with friends and small talk among strangers.

Reality television. It is an oxymoron. Regular people with “unscripted” drama. I use double quotes because most of the bulk of reality television is SCRIPTED. People break up and cheat and get together.

This is what I think of the cult of fakeness. They are hiding insecurity. It is a social psychosis. That is to say that it is socially reinforced – people are rewarded for joining in fakeness, and punished for not joining in fakeness. Assholes, guys who are manipulative and domineering, get the girls. It is in a guy’s best interest to be an asshole. Girls who don’t put out are shut out.

The cult of fakeness is about being cool. And being cool means adhering to a code of social behavior that flips on a whim – what’s in style now wasn’t in style just a while ago. The cult of fakeness teaches you to not be yourself, in fact, to ignore your own instincts and intuitions, to lose your own individuality. The cult of fakeness teaches you to hate yourself, and to always think about what other people are thinking about and try to be like other people.

Life isn’t about impressing other people. Life is not about looking fly, having loose cash, getting hooked up with some hot bitches. Life is about being yourself, doing what you want to do and not what other people think you should do, and doing what really makes you happy. Being someone you’re not doesn’t make you happy. Be yourself, even if other people don’t like you.