Damien Galeone

I am uncool. And let’s just be clear, I am not saying that I am a nerd. So don’t think I’m one of those ass cadets ostensibly mocking their nerdy lifestyle knowing full well that being a nerd is so cool right now that if Orville Redenbacher were alive he’d be getting more play than Tommy Lee pre-dreadlocks. We’re not talking about liking science or reading books.

I am uncool and it’s a totally different thing.

There are symptoms of being uncool: weekly Facebook posts about cats and bodily functions, there are sweater vests, a true like of broccoli, and (at 38 years old) a weekly call to my mom. My homepage alternates between Wikipedia’s Recent Deaths page, Prague’s public transport time schedule, and a dating website on which I have not met another human being in two years (their robot emails me once a month, I guess just to check on me).

I am also linguistically uncool. I say the word ‘jeepers’ often. In the last week I have used the words sharp, slacks, trousers, short pants, neato and handsome all to describe pants. On occasion I add the suffix –izzle to verbs and nouns, which I thizzle is annoying, my frizzle.

Though I can keep my uncoolness at arm’s length most of the time, it does attack now and then.

Today it’s two things.

The first thing is that I am – at this moment – wearing a monochrome outfit. I am wearing blue sneakers, jeans and a light blue button down shirt. This is something I miraculously pull off at least once a fortnight. Last week I wore olive drab trousers, a green shirt, a brown jacket and brown shoes. My bag was also olive drab. There is a brown insignia in the middle of it. I looked like a giant poop walking down the road listening to music. This was not a cognizant decision.

Still, my uncoolness is really evident in terms of music. With the exact opposite musical instinct as might boast a hipster, I catch on to a musical trend about fourteen years after everyone else.

As my primary school classmates talked about Faith No More and Duran Duran, I told them (with vigor, by the way) about my sister and I singing along to Man of La Mancha. Nobody was impressed. I enjoyed my first Duran Duran concert in 2001 in Pittsburgh. And as my friends waxed nostalgic and mocked the 80s atmosphere I pretended to be joking with them and yet found myself secretly mystified by this Rio lass and wondered why she might be dancing on the sand.

I found more show tunes in high school, along with 1950s Doo-wop. While my friends were wearing flannels and listening to Pearl jam and Nirvana, or other friends were wearing tie-dye and listening to The Dead and Phish, I had graduated to Dion and the Belmonts and Jesus Christ Superstar. I got the Evita Soundtrack for my 16^th birthday.

I suppose I am thinking about this because of the theoretical sadness I felt about Ray Manzarek’s death the other day. My friends and brother (who is almost certainly disowning me as he reads this) posted about it on Facebook and there were other visual tributes. I came close to posting something until I realized that I just didn’t care in the least. I mean, aside from someone being dead – which is almost always sad – I had no feelings toward this whatsoever. I know he was in The Doors, a band which had taken their name from a book I had read in my short-lived (2 week) psychedelic phase. And that is the closest connection I can make with the cool.

Besides, I think Jim Morrison was a prick anyway. But I bet I could do a grand monochrome outfit with those leather slacks he used to wizzle.