The Walking Cliché

So me and Patch are at B&N yesterday, waiting in line to pay for our purchases. She got a big illustrated book about Peter Pan. I found a PJF anthology (Riverworld and Other Stories) to add to my collection.

Directly in front of us is the Walking Cliché. Let me describe him; perhaps you’ve seen him out there, too.

First thing you notice is the scuzzy scruffiness. Hair fashionably unkempt, several days of growth on his face. Scarf wrapped two and a half times around his olive green army jacket that’s not quite an army jacket. Matching wool cap that’s not quite wool. Jeans, almost torn at one knee. Some type of compromise between a boot and a shoe.

A slightly unpleasant odor envelopes him like a halo; I try not to get too close as the line slowly, inexorably, moves forward towards the cashiers.

He’s listening to an iPod, of course. The white wires protruding from the smelly jacket into his mangy hair beneath the cap. Then, because I guess you can’t waste any time not listening to a cool song, he whips it out and with a dexterous thumb queues up another one for us. I say “for us,” because me and Patch and probably the three people behind us can hear it, too.

My wife is probably sick of it, but every time I see a commercial for an i-something, or a cell phone, or a fast food restaurant, or the NFL, or a non-luxury car line, every 20-40 year old male is viewed through the scuzzy-scruffy lens. My pet peeve is, I don’t know anybody who looks like this, and I happen to work in a company that employees eighty or ninety 20-40 year old males. Even in my travels about the county every weekend, I never see any dude that looks like the dude I stood behind in line yesterday. Who are these people?

Hence the eponym, the Walking Cliché.