As the old saying goes, "Nothing good ever happens after midnight." Or maybe it's, "Nothing good ever happens after 2 AM." Anyway, you can be certain that nothing good is happening once it's getting on for 5 AM, and you're on a "hoverboard" in a parking lot in a West Hollywood gas station having an argument with an employee through the bulletproof window thing, but that's where Tostitos Tyler found himself one recent Saturday-night-turned-Sunday-morning.
Advertisement
I usually stick up for millennials. For every thinkpiece calling our generation entitled narcissists, I say, "Hey, what about the longterm economic trends forcing us into debt and making us poorer than our parents? What about the culture of instant gratification fostered by the boomers and normalized by Gen X? What about you, in other words, you hypocritical ratfucks?" Young people are always whiny little shits—remember the music of the 60s?—and I can excuse a lot of lousy behavior by way of youth and by way of growing up in an era that gave us 9/11, George W. Bush, a nasty recession, and a loose labor market, all in the span of a decade.
Advertisement
We don't get the cashier's perspective in all this. You can hear his side of the argument faintly, but mostly he exists in our minds: Struggling to get the goddamn shit this guy wants so he'll leave, working bleary-eyed at a shift no one ever wants, enduring the abuse in anticipation of his mandated-by-law ten-minute break. He obviously doesn't want to be there getting yelled at by some guy with a carb crazing and a $400 scooter. He has no idea why this transaction—a humiliation for both sides, a play with no ending and no beginning and no protagonist—has to exist in the first place.
Advertisement
All to say, I can understand why the cashier is being a bit of a dick to Tostitos Tyler, maybe even getting things wrong on purpose to see him throw a tantrum. Tostitos Tyler is a dick. Tostitos Tyler is a symbol of oppression that's almost a bit too on the nose with that man-bun and hoverboard. Tostitos Tyler is also, in all likelihood, oppressed in some way himself.If the cashier is not there by choice, well, neither is Tostitos Tyler. He's not zooming down to the gas station to buy pasta at 5 AM on a whim. Something has gone wrong. Tostitos Tyler is in bad shape, maybe partially by choice, sure, but the fabric of America has failed Tostitos Tyler too. The future has collapsed on him, the same as it has collapsed on all of us. Now he can't even get the one—OK, three—things he wants, the snack foods that are the only worthwhile good that this post-whatever version of capitalism can produce. Can you blame him for trying to exert control over the tiny sliver of his life he still has command over? For lashing out, in the throws of an early-morning desperation, at the only person he can lash out at?Well yes, yes we can.Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.