Are We All Just Posers Now?

The ghost of Holden Caulfield, Nike's fake flop, and the vacancy of the 2010s

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: everything is fake and nobody cares (but we really, really used to).

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Suppertime! I promise to feed you only once a week, and never after midnight.

Ingredient List

🎵 : Here’s some of the songs referenced in the topics below.

📖 : By far, my favorite thing I’ve read this week (maybe this year), is Will Leitch’s take on fatherhood and the beginning of letting go, of seeing yourself become a smaller player in your life’s greatest work. It made me cry and think about it for days, which few literary things do.

🎧 : I have so many mixed feelings of the rise of AI. I think it represents the pinnacle of this slow widening of the gap between extremes and with it, the most incredible advances will come with the most egregious harms. It will be both utopian and dystopian. Anyway, this week’s Search Engine episode does a lot to break down how Google’s new AI could fundamentally change the purpose of the internet.

This Past Week

I turned 42 on Thursday, my Jackie Robinson year. No barriers were broken, though I did have a good hill workout yesterday. On the actual day, I celebrated by taking my kids on a run/hike in Patapsco Valley State Park, and will play disc golf today with some of my best friends back home in Pennsylvania. My wife made me a Key lime pie and it was great. I have everything I want in life, so that’s pretty fine with me.

A few other things I wrote and/or edited this week:

• “Mizuno Neo Vista (Shoe Review)” for Believe in the Run

• “Rabbit Dream Chaser (Shoe Review)” for Believe in the Run

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round-up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic manner. You can subscribe here.

And now, onto the dinner service.

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This week’s newsletter is dedicated to one of my best friends growing up, born exactly one week before me (May 16, 1982), who tragically died eight years ago this August. Even when we grew apart later in life, we always made it a point to wish each other happy birthday. I think about him a lot because he was my first friend, and one of my closest friends growing up, before all the things that could tear us down made themselves known. He’s woven into a couple of the stories below and is one of the kids in the feature photo for the Kids Birthdays in Dive Bars post. Love you, Shane.

Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Rye Whiskey

In 11th grade, I used to be the go-to person in my class for writing other people’s book reports. Though not an honest job, it was a respectable one, and it makes me sad to see another job lost to automation. The wheel of progress moves on, crushing all beneath its tread, and the best we can do is flatten ourselves against the ground, chests pulled tight with our last breath, hoping that history remembers us as pioneers, trailblazers, or humans at all. ← And that is how you embellish a paper with flowery prose to maximize its word count.

At the time, I only charged a measly $20 (mostly because I didn’t mind the reading part), and had my own business tagline: “If it’s a D, the paper’s free.” I broke my own code of ethics just once, trying to sloppily integrate Cliff Notes like an amateur. Several other people had the same idea, and they all failed the assignment. An honest businessman through and through, I refunded Kevin Bellows his money.

For one assignment, my friend Shane came to me with an emergency job on a Friday– his book report was due on the following Monday and he needed my services. Either that, or he gave it to me a month before and I procrastinated, both of which are completely plausible. I agreed to do it and started reading immediately. And by that, I mean I put it off until Sunday. 

The book was “The Catcher in the Rye.” I burned through that thing from cover to cover, not because the report was due the next day, but because I found Holden. And my life would never be the same. 

It’s hard to describe the stranglehold that that book held on me for a period of about four years, from my junior year of high school until my junior year of college. My entire worldview marched in lockstep with Holden. His odd sense of humor, the disdain for rules and expectations, the way he kind of just meandered through life. His love for his younger sibling and his unrequited love for a girl, of course. His life sounded like “The Only Living Boy in New York,” set to the page.

Of course, there were the phonies. And they were everywhere.

They really were coming through the windows. I was basically a straight edge kid before that was a cool thing to be, so for me, 99% of the world were phonies. Everyone who drank, everyone who smoked, everyone who did everything that I didn’t. Looking back, I was probably a phony too. I idolized the Brits and especially Oasis, who ripped off The Beatles as much as they could. I was for sure pretentious, at least in my philosophy of life. I mean, for chrissakes, I owned a peacoat and carried around a notebook of poetry, it kind of comes with the territory.

Eventually, I grew up. I realized that phoniness is just a part of life. Football players actually throw great parties. Art school kids aren’t cool or interesting, they’re just rich kids with a lot of time on their hands. The girl who dated the phonies as you stood in the cold in your peacoat, writing notebooks full of poetry about how she could do better? Turns out, you really weren’t compatible after all.

But boy, did I believe it. I still do, sometimes. When I see an Instagram reel but know the person doing it is just putting on a front to hit the algorithm. I mean, social media itself is Holden Caulfield’s worst nightmare come to life, Sally preening for the masses that don’t care about her, that don’t get her, showing off her Pencey Prep life, talking about girls and liquor and sex all day.

My firstborn son was named Rye, after the novel. My other son is named Jonas, partially after the protagonist in “The Giver,” another book full of phonies. 

Luckily, they’re both real ones.

Course 2

Appetizer: Double IPA

I’ve been listening more to older Radiohead recently, which is something I can still do because I seem to always find something new that I previously missed in their music– an interesting bass line, a subtle guitar part, or the 523rd reference to society falling apart thanks to the government or technology or a police force founded on Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, who are super concerned about girls with Hitler hairdos and guys that talk in maths. Can we start with the people stealing my packages, guys?

Of course, that means I was listening to “Fake Plastic Trees” off The Bends, one of the more accessible set of songs for the casual Radiohead fan, this particular one featuring a very predictable verse/chorus/bridge that was both meaningful and radio-friendly.

The album came out on March 13, 1995, which means it was written and recorded in 1994. Which is why this one line is so striking to me: “He used to do surgery, for girls in the eighties.”

The eighties were still happening a mere 5 years before this record happened. The full swing of the eighties was only popping off a decade prior. And yet, it was such a definitive time that Thom Yorke felt he could use it as both a delineation and an illustration that would invoke a certain reaction to that line in his song. If that decade didn’t matter, he would’ve just written: “He used to do surgery, on women in their eighties.” And we’d move on to the rest of the song. 

In the same way, Adam Sandler starred in “The Wedding Singer” (arguably his best and most well-rounded movie and one of my favorite movies of all-time), a movie that came out in 1998. The film took place in 1985, and the entire premise is centering a love story around a scene-by-scene recap of that particular era in time. Every scene is a reference to eighties pop-culture in some way: Michael Jackson, white limos, Boy George, feathered hair, Billy Idol, Rubik’s cubes, CD players (they play CDs, Jules), and on and on. 

Now imagine making a movie about 2014 or dedicating a lyric in a song to the year before Trump became president. Not to a specific historical event in that time, but just the “two thousand and teens.” It would fall completely flat, with zero emotion. The aughts were somewhat meaningless, though they still stand as a moment in time before the full adoption of smartphones and social media. The teens, on the other hand, are completely pointless.

I blame most of that on the iPhone which has kept us in a state of arrested development, but I also blame it on the general lack of originality. I’m not saying it hasn’t existed since 2000, there are certainly some incredibly artists and advances that came out of the decade. But I’m not sure any of it came together to form a cohesive movement that mattered. The truth is, people take fewer risks these days. Part of it is social pressure, part of it is the helicopter generation, part of it is general malaise, but no one wants to do anything that shakes things up. And that’s why, for the last 15 years, we’ve been cursed with Mumford and Sons dying and being reborn in different incarnations. 

On the other hand, every decade from the sixties to the end of the century had definitions that are just known without explanation. From automobiles to music to film to fashion, they all fit into a bucket that’s easy to draw water from. The only thing we can pull from the last ten years is a palm-sized computer that we all know ended our lives as we know it and an electric truck that looks like an unfinished Nintendo graphic from 1993.

I don’t know if that’s depressing or enlightening or just inconsequential, but it just is. There’s the malaise creeping back in– there’s nothing we can do about it, so we’ll just scroll on our phones.

Maybe I’ll throw a twenty-teens party next year (hyphen is very necessary in that party invitation), and we can bring back all the glorious moments of a decade ago. We’ll drink double IPAs and take photos with our iPhone 5c, then filter it through a sepia-toned Instagram photo set to a Lumineers song.

Trust me, it’ll be memorable.

Course 3

The Main: Maple & Milk Caps

There was this thing in the nineties, and maybe it was a thing before then, where authenticity mattered. It wasn’t an option like today, where self-help gurus tell you that it’s important for your brand and will help grow your follower base or help you find a compatible partner.

Being authentic back then was a social life-or-death scenario and there wasn’t any gray area. This went for music, clothing, sports cards– literally everything. It was a status symbol, for sure. Keeping it real was a cornerstone of the rap genre, maybe the most important rule of all. Maybe you could afford an authentic Apex jacket, but it wasn’t an authentic Starter jacket. You could buy Nikes, but they weren’t Jordans. And god forbid you buy British Knights instead of Reebok Hexalite. Nice try, do not pass go, go directly home to your trailer and feel like a poor. 

When Urban Outfitters started selling imitation vintage band t-shirts and selling them for $10 a pop, I was viscerally outraged. You either have to get it at a show, or find it in a thrift store. You can’t just recreate a Van Halen tour tee. I even felt the same way about distressed jeans. They were pre-faded in a factory? Why? How? Now, the smallest amount of holo foil or gold on a fake Pokémon card merits a spot in the front page of my kids’ collector binders. Zero shame.

The worst part about the nineties was this: You could still do all the right things back then, you could even look exactly the same, but people still knew. There was a bullshit detector built into every kid at that time, and if you didn’t have some sort of long and storied history with a trend that had been hot for all of 10 minutes, you would get called out on it immediately.

I know, because I did get called out on it, when my mom dropped an ungodly amount of money from our family’s monthly budget on a long-sleeved JNCO shirt at the Colonial Park Mall. I walked into school, stoked that I finally had something that wasn’t from Kmart, and– before homeroom even started– I was immediately called a poser by the kid whose parent bought him name-brand Pogs. 

Poser. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but being called a poser was enough to drive a sharp stake right through your teenage heart. Those two syllables could pull the drainage plug on whatever little confidence you had stored up since birth. There was nothing worse. 

It meant you were fake, you weren’t a part of the group, you didn’t know who you were. Bobby was right, of course– I was a poser. I had glasses and buck teeth and a part straight down the middle of my head. I had absolutely no business wearing a JNCO shirt. I wanted so bad to get out of that lane and into another and I was trying to be something I wasn’t just to fit in. It absolutely killed me. 

Shortly thereafter, I started skateboarding. For a few years, it became my life. Eventually I’ll dive more into it, because it was such a special moment in time for me. If you were a skater in the mid-nineties, back at the beginning of its resurrection, you’d know that it was an entire identity that consumed your life. Being authentic mattered because you actually were putting in the hard work– practicing kickflips for hours in the dead summer sun, pulling and cleaning your bearings every other week, begging your parents for rides to a random parking lot where your friends heard there was a waxed ledge. 

So when someone came along and tried to shoehorn themselves into the culture (e.g. some kid who walked into school in a pair of Airwalk Ones and a front-to-back Alien Workshop complete deck), it was almost offensive. You didn’t consult us first? You just assumed you could show up like this? Can you even do a manual for more than two seconds? What a poser. 

It felt good to be one of the real ones, because it felt like you had found your tribe. Real people, back then, not a handle on Instagram. The ones who you called on the phone and said “meet me here” and then they’d either show up or you’d wonder if they died. Authenticity wasn’t a word, it was just baked into what you did. Nobody told you to be authentic or real, it was just an expected part of moving through life. Which is why it was so egregious to be fake.

All those real ones built up skateboarding. Though I was on the East Coast, It felt like southern California invaded my being, the hotbed for nearly every skate brand at the time. Living in central Pennsylvania, the few skate shops around were bare bones; as such, our singular means of access was through CCS (California Cheap Skates), which was basically our version of porn. I’ve never been as aroused looking at a magazine as I was then, and it was literally just a catalog of skateboarding gear. I legit collected them and kept them in a drawer on the headboard of my bed. Every brand you could imagine: Blind, Etnies, Girl, Maple, World Industries, Hook-Ups, Zero, and about a hundred more. They all had their own identities and they all ruled. It all felt interesting and new and nobody knew why one brand was better than the other, but somehow you figured out the hierarchy of what was cool and what wasn’t. Even the big brands weren’t really that big– Birdhouse and Powell were still relatively small companies with just a handful of employees.

Which is why I’ve always been conflicted about Nike.

At least on the East Coast, there was this feeling that everybody else built this culture and then Nike came in and tried to capitalize on the thing that everyone else built. While it’s true that the Dunks had a place in skateboarding in the ‘80s, that was just out of necessity. Skate shoes didn’t exist then and Nike never did anything to advance the cause. Then, in the early ‘90s, other brands actually made shoes for skaters, and built up the community. Fast forward to 1997, Nike came back around and tried to scoop up that customer base by releasing a set of shoes marketed directly at skaters. Everyone saw through the phoniness, and nobody bought it. By all measures it was an utter failure, and a lesson in why authenticity matters. At the time, Nike were posers. 

They went away with their tail between their legs, but came back a few years later, with the now-iconic SB Dunk, a shoe that actually looked like a skate shoe and had elements that would benefit skaters. They went all-in and signed Paul Rodriguez to a pro contract, one of the best skaters at the time, followed by Nyjah Huston, another young phenom. They showed they cared, that they were willing to go all-in, and the perception changed. Now, Nike is one of the best-selling skate brands in the world and is an integral part of skate culture.

You can debate whether it was done properly or not, but the fact remains– at some point, they convinced people they weren’t posers, and that’s all that mattered.

Which brings me back to my original point– back then, you really had to work for it, because there were real stakes on the line. If you had a fake jersey, it was seen as a blemish on your entire character. If you wore a flannel shirt but didn’t listen to Nirvana, what were you even? A scarecrow? Now, it’s almost a badge of honor to get a fake that looks as good as an authentic, and that goes for everything from jerseys to Louis Vuitton purses.

And it’s only getting worse. With the rise of AI and deep fakes, the magic of Photoshop and Premiere Pro, and the ubiquitous use of Chat GPT across all disciplines, none of it matters anymore. Everything you see on Instagram is bullshit, because when you put a camera in front of someone’s face, they transform into something else, whether they want to or not. When you are your own brand and your brand makes money, it’s all different. Nobody cares because it’s too time consuming and tiring to rage against the machine. Yes, sir, I will do what you tell me, warbles the next Noah Kahan copycat.

It all feels like a farce, from the MAGA patriots buying the cheapest Chinese goods at the lowest prices to the feigned TikTok maladies of the victimhood Olympics to the just-sprouted campus protests. (You know you’ve reached peak poser when an anti-fascist taking over Columbia’s Hamilton Hall is really a nepo baby who lives in a $3.5 million dollar Park Slope brownstone bought by his ad exec parents, cosplaying as a revolutionary while relishing in the riches of pure, unadulterated capitalism.) None of it has roots, it’s all reactionary and it’s only real insofar as the current algorithm carries it. We all belong to our own individual political party, faking it for some fake audience who’s faking outrage or concern with whatever corresponding emoji.

Here we are now, entertainers.

In content publishing today, there’s such an emphasis today on authenticity, and I do think it’s more valuable than ever, because if you can find it– whether within yourself or someone else– then you’ve struck gold. What used be an expectation is now the exception. 

The problem is that, if you are a poser, if you are wearing the latest trend or copying the hottest influencers just to get clicks and likes, nobody’s going to call you out on it. They’ll just hit the heart icon and move on, another fake like in a sea of them. We’re all posers.

I don’t think there’s a solution to this, I think it’s just the way it is and there’s no real point in waxing nostalgic about the times we could call someone a poser to their face. Back when a little shame could go a long way. It’s just where we are in time.

Now excuse me while I go run in my newest Nike trail shoe, sent to me free of charge by the same company that I used to rage against as a teen, in the hopes that I’ll give it a good review and send customers their way to build their newest push into trail running, another community built by the culture over the past two decades that the biggest footwear corporations are now clawing at.

Don’t worry, I’ll be real about it– I promise I’m not a poser. Now follow me on Instagram and like and subscribe my YouTube reviews on Believe in the Run.

Me as a poser in my thirties before my ankles gave out

Course 4

Dessert: Peanuts and Cracker Jacks

A handful of times each baseball season, the Orioles will have a concert night, where a national act of modest popularity will perform on a stage in shallow centerfield, right along the infield dirt. The concert itself is included with the price of admission, but you can upgrade your ticket to get a field pass, meaning you can watch the show from the dirt of Camden Yards, right in front of the stage.

Ticket upgrades are for suckers, or at least not for me– a cheap fan who buys tickets on Stubhub an hour before the game and brings his own food into the ballpark (a little-known hack at Oriole Park). 

I can see the concert just as well from my seats, or I’ll figure out a way to get closer.

Halfway through the game, I thought– it would be cool to get on the field for the show. The headlining act that night was The Avett Brothers, another band who falls into the loosely floating genre of Americana. Despite hearing for years how good they were live, and being an avid fan of good live shows, I had somehow yet to see them. 

Again, I had no intentions of upgrading a ticket, so I figured the best way forward was forgery. I first had to figure out what method of entry was used to get on the field. I wrongly assumed it was a detail on the ticket and initially tried to edit my e-ticket on my phone to look like a passable fake. That didn’t matter, as I learned, because anyone who had the upgrade received a special, custom bracelet at the gate. 

The concert started, and it was good, but not as good as if you were on the field. As they got to the end of their set, I knew they’d do an encore and that half the fans wouldn’t know they’d do an encore, which means they’d be leaving the field, then trying to get back on. Which is exactly what happened.

I also knew that the age old rule of con work applied here– just look like you know what you’re doing and nobody will question you. So as a rush of people came off the field and then back on, scrambling to catch the final songs, I just blended right in, flashed my wristband to security (which was my GPS watch), and went right on.

This was in 2022 and it was my first show since the pandemic began two years before. I didn’t walk onto the field expecting much, but it really was a power punch of emotion. Live music just hits different, especially after a long drought. Especially on a warm summer night in one of my favorite places on earth. Especially when the opening of the encore was “No Hard Feelings,” my favorite Avett Brothers song and one of my favorite songs in general. The premise of the lyrics is an entire musing on hypothetical paths we take when die.

And after a couple years of dying and death, both in real life with my father-in-law and inside of myself, the song felt like a real release, a way for things to start coming out. I thought about all of those things a lot in the span of five minutes and I cried as the music soaked me, because there was really no other option. 

I still had some hard feelings, but I felt like I could start letting them go.

End of Menu

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Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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