Earnestness

Today I saw a twenty-something year old man in a bodybuilder tank-top, driving down a busy street with exotic dance music playing at top volume. There is nothing funnier than a real-life cliche. A person who isn’t being cagey or wearing a mask. Instead they inhabit space as a copy of a person that mostly exists in our collective imagination, unapologetically common, but odd and funny at the same time. It feels incongruent to confront any kind of earnestness when viewed through our permanent ironic lens.