stuffhipstershate:

Patriotism

Carson: Sweet jacket, dude.

Vince: Thanks.

Carson: I was being sarcastic, man.

Vince: What, why? This is a fucking rad jacket. What are you hating on?

Carson: OK… first of all, it’s like, fucking three sizes too small, second of all it’s fashioned from acid-washed denim, and third of all — and most important of all — it has a fucking HUGE American flag on the back, dude! What the fuck is up with that?

Vince: What? What? This is fucking hot. Some chick even came up to me at Marco’s party and commented on it — before she ripped it off my skinny ass so that we could take a dip in the rooftop kiddie pool, that is. She even went home with me.

Carson: Because of the jacket?

Vince: Because of the jacket.

Carson: OK…

Vince: Look, man, don’t hate. Me and ol’ Uncle Sam here have been together for, like, 10 years now.

Carson: You’ve never worn it before…

Vince: Well, that’s because of terrorism.

Carson: What the fuck?

Vince: Terrorism. Terr-o-rism, man. I bought this bad boy at a Goodwill in my hometown back in 2001. I was so stoked to wear it. For real. And then… Well, you know, there was the war and whatnot and everyone got all fucking patriotic. I didn’t want to blend into the generalistic color palette of the American masses. I was expelled from that anthem-screeching throng at least 14 years ago, anyway — after fucking Flag Day at John’s Mill School, circa eighth grade.

Carson: What happened in eighth grade?

Vince: I had won the the fucking “honor” of reading my “I Am An American Because…” poem in front of the whole school — I had written some shit about Betsey Ross and how I was a fucking American because I once stitched together this pathetic little American flag and built a village in my backyard and reenacted the Revolutionary War or something with my sister’s troll dolls. Apparently, that literary travesty was akin to the fucking “Wasteland” in my teacher’s eyes. Whatever.

Anyway, I was all stoked about reading it — I so wanted to be a beat poet back then — until this little career fair before the actual ceremony. There were a few doctors and lawyers and whatever, but then they had motherfucking McDonald’s reps there. And they were, like, handing out fries. So all the kids were salivating all over the place and tripping all over their fucking jellie shoes to talk to those minimum-wage-hawking assholes. And I saw their futures hanging black before me like so many carrion birds swarming over the beaten and plasma-oozing corpses of the American dream.

So, when I got in front of the school, I just ripped that treacle-drenched poem to shreds and screamed, “Fuck McDonald’s!” Needless to say, I was escorted out of the Flag Day festivities, and, by proxy, any mentality that would impel me to don any color combination that symbolizes the genuine exaltation of overindulgence coupled with utter and complete uniformity.

But like, I feel like enough time has passed at this point, and enough people have extricated themselves from the frothing, rip-off-your-skin pride in the artifacts of Americana that I can wear this again without looking like a true red-white-and-blue asshole. I’ve been wearing it all fucking week.

Carson: Ah, fair enough. You know Monday was Flag Day, right?

Vince: Ah, shit…

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