How To Be Cool
True cool is pure acceptance, not knobhead hipster behaviour
Some time ago, I was catching up with my niece.
She was telling me how she loves her boyfriend but has issues with her boyfriend’s best friend. I asked her what the problem was.
She told me that the guy just wasn’t cool.
She told me he didn’t know how to join in their conversations intellectually, his clothes were very daggy, and he tried too hard to fit in. She said that her friends cringed whenever the kid spoke or did anything.
On another day, I was having lunch at a well-known band venue in Melbourne
Band venues are often welcoming, but in this case, the guy behind the bar was too busy noticing who was admiring his t-shirt of some band that I have never heard of and couldn’t give a fuck about.
I was there with my wife and my elderly parents, and he didn’t go out of his way to make us feel welcome because we weren’t welcome. We were made to feel right out of place.
Because I was with my parents, I behaved myself.
What I wanted to do was explain to the little pretentious ring licker he wouldn’t know what cool was if it smashed him in the teeth.
No, what I really wanted to do was smash him in the teeth.
Is it cool to have missing teeth these days? I wouldn’t know, but it would be interesting to find out what a little hipster fuck like him thought about it.
Anyway, CALM DOWN, FRANK, as my wife always says.
On the other hand, I empathise
As a young person, you have fuck all idea about what cool means.
You are an utterly clueless fuck.
You think being cool means wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, having the right haircut.
You think it means saying,
That’s cool, man
When you should say,
Congratulations.
Or you think it means sniffing a half-laugh at the embarrassing behaviour of the poor snot-nosed loser in the corner who everyone is ignoring.
Teenagers have an excuse — they are mostly post-pubic, zit covered knobheads. But anyone over twenty-five doesn’t. If the above describes you and you are of age, listen up.
The coolest guy I ever knew was named Clive
Now, if you are a serious bellend, you might think that Clive isn’t cool because of the make-believe name that his parents gave him.
You would be wrong.
I was fifteen when I first met Clive, and he taught me the true meaning of cool.
We were at a party that was full of try-hard fuck knuckles trying to impress the girls with their Coca-Cola spinners and their Reebok Pumps, but ya know, it was the early nineties, so whatever.
A young fella called Mike had these sneakers on, which were known as ‘Tesco tearaways’. Essentially, they were cheap sneakers with velcro, and I saw a few people looking at them and laughing. There was some dumb conversation about Nirvana or Pearl Jam happening, and Mike kept piping in with stupid comments.
Kids turned away and smirked, whispering to each other like greasy weasels. Girls would snigger and slag Mike off behind his back.
Clive was the coolest of kids.
He wasn’t that good-looking, but the girls fancied him anyway. I noticed Clive because he never rejected Mike at all. Clive nodded, listening intently to everything Mike said, no matter how stupid it was. Clive responded to everything like a true gentleman.
Afterwards, everyone planned to go somewhere else cool, and they were making efforts to keep Mike in the dark. When everyone stood up to leave, Clive walked over to Mike and said,
let’s go
He made sure Mike came with us.
A genuinely cool bastard
I never spoke to Clive. I had no need. Clive was seventeen, but I noticed a level of cool that was unique compared to the others.
Clive didn’t give a fuck about his clothes, and somehow that made his clothes fashionable.
He never tried to impress anyone, which made everyone impressed by him.
So when he outright made sure that Mike was accepted into the group, everyone followed, and Mike became part of the group.
When Clive nodded and took Mike’s stupid comments seriously and made him feel included, I realised that’s what cool people do. They have an internal equanimity and purity of vision that simply doesn’t have time for dualistic games.
The genuinely cool people dress for themselves. They don’t give a fuck about what anyone thinks, and yet, without even trying, they understand the precious nature of every single being, and they do what they have to do to make sure everyone is protected and looked after.
Don’t be a fucking pretentious bellend
If you want to know how to be cool. The answer is this:
Stop trying to fit in.
The world needs more freaks. We are fucking experts at replicating each other like biological 3D printers, and if that's cool, then the whole motherfucking world is cool. Which it isn’t.
If you give a fuck even slightly what someone thinks about you, you are not cool. You are a pretentious knobhead.
Stop copying what others do because you are afraid of being left out.
I don’t mean you should hide in a corner either. If someone comments on your independence, there is a standard phrase to be used. Repeat after me:
Fuck you, you fucking goat shagging prick.
But to take it to the next level, be more like Clive
Always protect every single being like they are your very own brother and sister, regardless of how freaky or strange they are.
I’m talking about people, animals, and plants. Fucking everyone.
Make a vow right now. Repeat after me:
May I never bring harm to a single being for the rest of existence. May the part of me that hurts others be destroyed forever, and may I only bring protection, peace, happiness and liberation to all beings from now on, for eternity.
Repeat it every damn day until it becomes your reality.
That is the true definition of cool.
I think a "Be Like Clive' T-shirt would be cool as fuck.
The coolest guy I ever met was named Steve. I was about 28 at the time, he was nearing 40 and looked my age because he had been a vegetarian since he was 9 years old. He smoked 2 packs of Marb Reds a day and would only drink two things: fresh hand squeezed Florida orange juice (we lived in Tampa so there were plenty of fresh organic oranges) and whiskey. Specifically the top shelf Jack Daniels type that was aged for 10 years in an oak barrel. Back then it was close to $50 a bottle and he polished one of these off daily. He worked at the telemarketing company I co-managed. He was our top rep even though he only worked for an hour or two a day. He would walk in wearing his leather duster and bondage pants like he stepped out of a 1980's depeche mode or bauhaus video - even though it was around 2010 - while the rest of us were forced to wear a suit and tie. somehow HR let him slide while the rest of us wondered how the hell he talked them into allowing it. he was as pale as rice paper even though we lived in one of the sunniest places on the planet. he was always outside so it wasn't like he shunned the sun, he just somehow never tanned. He made around 2 grand a week and somehow was always broke. His tiny apartment lacked any furniture except a bed and a few handmade tables and a bookshelf that he had imported from Tibet. They cost more than I made in a year. He never watched TV, had no idea how to get on the 'internet'. In fact, he barely knew what it was. He was so good at his job telemarketing that the company hired a girl just to do data entry specifically for his orders because he said he would quit if he had to use one of them 'damn devil boxes'. Every Friday, we would go to a strip club after eating dinner at a vegetarian Indian restaurant, go to a jazz bar where we would smoke $50 cigars while watching the half-drunk, thin and exotic looking woman in the slinky party dress coo over the microphone - even though we both hated jazz... or we would just call up a few high end call girls, get an ounce of coke, and spend the next 2 days blowing lines off their tight, nubile bodies without ever having had sex with any of them. I always wondered what happened to the guy. My guess is, he had an IQ near 200, was not born on this world, and went back to whatever planet he came from because the dude was way too cool to be a normal human being.