Being cool has come a long way. I can’t really place my finger on when, but I’d like to knight the psychedelic ’70s with the origin. No one really knows what it means, and the word, rather the term, assumes a meaning only in context and again, only when it is part of the utterance of a worthy speaker. If a bespectacled village idiot says it, the inherent dignity that it seems to bear vanishes in a flash, and you don’t have anyone speaking of it in a 50-mile radius for a week. But, say, if Basshunter uses it in one of his songs, it undergoes rapid evolution into a catchphrase which you will find being spoken about in the whole country. I guess it’s one of those things that happen on YouTube: a video is posted, the number of views skyrockets, and it becomes what is called an ‘internet phenomenon’ and the centre of cyber-tourism. Anyway, the young men and women crowding in parties – supplemented, of course, with bulging wallets and bosoms – are cool, but those sitting home by the utopic fireplace and smoking a pipe aren’t. Driving a car that makes a lot of noise and farts even more smoke is cool, while driving a truck (which does the same things) isn’t. Wearing a shirt that has a design resembling a mutated eagle with matching denim pants is cool, but wearing casual shirt and pants while the heat shoots past sweltering isn’t. However, once a formerly cool guy is spotted by a wannabe, the trends catch on with ‘being cool’. Cotton clothing? Cool! Trucks? Cool! Fireplace and pipe? Cool!
And that’s why I think the need to be cool should exist. If you don’t understand, here’s why: as long as people fear individuality, as long as people accentuate their external loci of identity, they go farther away from being who they really are. Only by touching the flames of a fire can you know, in the future, why you shouldn’t do it. Only when the time comes that ‘not being themselves’ is no longer a feasible solution will they understand the importance of being oneself. Being cool is being individual. Being cool is being unafraid. Being cool is believing in oneself. The cool guy on the street is who he is because he doesn’t, for a single moment, care about what others think of him; you admire that quality in him, but through a mask that filters out the cause of that. You see only the effect, and you don the garb of the effect. Thereon, what ever you do will be fake because your actions don’t stem from an inborn cause. It’s just like trying to make the external shell of a car run – you didn’t bother about the engine. All you can do now is frame it in a cubicle and make it a show-piece. People will ogle at it, but when the real car runs by, your time will run out.
‘Being cool’ is not a stereotypification of any sort. Like I said before, it has to be the nucleus of a worthy utterance from a worthy utterer. It can be understood only when the contextual meaning is understood. It’s not something you would use as you would ‘Fuck!’. That’s a word that everyone knows and understands, but ‘cool’ demystified is… fluorescent? Yes, that’s the word!
Clathration Therapy 