Wikipedia needs 2,500 words to define poseurs, which is 2,499 more than I need. Poseurs are fakes. Pure and simple. There is nothing more to say about it.
Poseurs pretend to be something they are not. Or they say things they don’t mean. Which some call hypocrites but I call liars. They say they don’t want big government but then scream when the fire department takes too long to respond. They say they don’t want government regulations but then whine when their kids get hurt from unsafe toys. They say they care about you and then ignore you. They say they’ll never leave you and then they walk out the door.
And the other truth about poseurs is this: Everyone is a poseur. Which is why I don’t have any friends.
I was talking about this with my best friend the other day. Oh, I guess he needs a fake name too. I’ll call him Neil. Neil Moriarty. That has a nice, Sherlock Holmes feel to it. The adventures of Hal and Neil.
Anyway, Neil totally agrees with me, which is why we are such good friends. We’ve been friends since junior high when we sat next to each other in English class. We both wrote for the school newspaper, “The Jeff Davis Dispatch.” We saw first hand how fake everyone is from covering things like the Great Cafeteria Pizza Cover-up, when the lunch ladies refused to come clean about the ingredients in those cardboard rectangles they called food.
Now Neil works over at MegaTech as a cog in the wheel of capitalism. He says everyone he works with is a poseur, pretending to care about the products they make, pretending to care about the customers they assist. Pretending to care about each other.
It makes me glad I don’t work. I mean, I want to work. I want to get a job, but the Grand Old Party of the Republic destroyed the economy so here I sit, in my mom’s basement, blogging away.
How pathetic is that? I’m 25 and I have no job and literally live in my mom’s basement. It’s like they say, some things are cliches because they are true. But they are also cliches.
Maybe this blogging thing will lead to something. Maybe I’ll get a job at a newspapers, except newspapers are dead. Giant dinosaurs walking the earth, not knowing the meteor has already hit. Although I think the dinosaurs died off because of slow climate change over a couple million years.
So who knows what will become of me. But at least I don’t have any friends trying to stab me in the back.
Though it is kind of lonely when there is no one you can trust.
It can also make me hungry, so I went upstairs to forage in the kitchen. My mom was there, getting some ice from the fridge. She was dressed for work in her business suit, her brief case on the counter.
“Hey mom, getting ready for work?” I asked.
“Getting ready? Hal, it’s six o’clock in the evening,” she said.
“Yeah?” I said, opening the freezer.
“I’m just getting home,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, “do we have any frozen waffles?”
“Waffles? Hal, are you just getting up?”
“Um. I think I ate something a while ago.”
“It’s not healthy to sit down in that basement all day,” she said. “Why don’t you should get together with Sharon?”
“Not interested,” I said. “I’m OK down there. Lots of animals live in caves.”
“I haven’t seen her in a while; how is she doing?”
“Sharon? I guess she’s OK,” I said.
“Did you two break up?”
“She was holding me back,” I said. I still couldn’t find the waffles. How can we have so much frozen food and no waffles? I should blog about that issue.
“Holding you back?” she said. “Hal, you spend all your time in the basement. What, exactly, is she holding you back from?”
“Stuff,” I said. “She was a poseur.”
“What do you mean a poseur?”
“I couldn’t trust her. She was never honest with me.”
“Did she lie to you about something?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just, she said she loved me. And now she doesn’t.”
“Well she seemed to visit you a lot down in the basement. Maybe she wanted to so something besides watch you play video games.”
“See, that’s another thing. She said she liked watching me play video games. Then she said it was boring. Poseur!”
“Hal, no girl wants to sit watching her boyfriend play games by himself. It’s boring,” she said.
“No, that’s not accurate,” I said. “I was playing with people online.”
“You were playing with other people and ignoring her?” she asked.
“She said she liked it. That was a fun Friday night for us.”
“That was a fun Friday night for you,” my mom said.
“You don’t get it, mom,” I said.
“Well, I’m sorry you two broke up,” she said. “I hope you’re doing OK.”
“Whatever,” I said, pulling out some Hot Pockets. “I don’t need people.”
“Whatever,” she said. “I don’t want you spending all your time in the basement.”
“I’m upstairs right now,” I said, gesturing with the Hot Pockets.
“That’s not what I mean. I want you to leave the house tomorrow. Go somewhere. Do something,” she said.
I put the Hot Pockets in the microwave. “Fine,” I said.
“Good,” she said. She walked out of the kitchen and headed down the hall.
“What are you um, doing tonight?” I asked.
“I’m beat,” she said. “I’m going up to my room for a bath, then I’ll probably watch TV or something.” And she walked up the stairs.
“Oh,” I said to the empty room. “OK.”
Like I said, it can get kind of lonely. But at least we have each other.
I took my Hot Pockets and headed back down to the basement.
