Lament for today’s young rebel! Go ahead, I’ll wait. Done yet? Oops, sorry. Nope I didn’t mean to rush you. Take your time. I’ll just be waiting here in the next sentence so move on whenever you feel like it. In order to ensure that you weren’t just lamenting without a cause for rebels, or mistakenly lamenting for rebels without a cause, let’s explore the dire situation that today’s average trend-bucking rebel faces.
There’s a quickly diminishing number of ways for young folks to say, “Hey! I resent people who are popular and similar to other people and I will express this resentment by harming my physical appearance in some way!” I mean, I guess people will always be able to just come outright and say that, but it’s really not going to have much effect without the necessary clothes and accessories and such.
Unfortunately, therein lies the problem. Fashion protestants have become so mainstream that they are destroying their own cause. It is almost impossible to come up with some fresh new way to make yourself less attractive. In no area is this more pronounced (often with a poor cockney accent) than the world of piercing. Everything has already been pierced: noses, eyebrows, navels, tongues, lips, naughty parts. I mean, how desperate have these people become?
Not desperate enough, and so I introduce the newest body part for piercing. I want to see people piercing their loose elbow skin. Now that’s rebellious! You need that skin, specifically for bending purposes. Now not only do you have some metal randomly wedged into your body but you’ve also committed to a full-on lifestyle change. With straight arms you’ll be able to do very little besides zombie impressions at which point it’s just a matter of fortnights until you’re craving flesh and eating people. After that you’re just one blue moon away from being killed by a torch wielding mob.
At this point people start thinking, “Wow, now that guy’s rebellious!” But you haven’t even gotten started yet! Because due to your ‘feisty spirit’ St. Peter takes pity on you and allow you into heaven. But even your ever-living spirit won’t let the man get it down and so you refuse to sit around and accept a peaceful eternity in the clouds. Heck no. Plus, it’s really hard for you to play your harp with all those elbow piercings. So you head on down to hell where it turns out that everybody has straight arms and they’re all sitting around a huge feast in the same way that they would in a cute parable in a Barbara Kingsolver novel. But you’re not selfish and mean like everybody else in hell and so you’ve got no problem feeding other people who can’t feed themselves with their straight arms. Four score and seven days later they’ve elected you King of the Netherworld and you make some really cool changes to hell. You know, in terms of interior design and stuff like that…
Now that’s rebellious.
And it was all because of a pierced elbow and a butterfly somewhere in South America that flapped its wings.