The worst for me are the urban cellphone users who make a show of being "connected" to someone else at all times; of having "important business", which is usually a description of what they're gonna get on their Whopper, or something some other idiot said to a third idiot.

They misuse music in the same way: to represent themselves on a public screen as they drive past. They imagine that their identities are cemented by their proximity to some loud and over-produced soundtrack. It's tiresome and unconvincing of anything but the pathetic nature of urban street theater.                                                                                                                     

It's just so much representation of self-importance, and attention-seeking behavior, that, comically enough, costs them money to perform.   

People are afraid these days of silence, because it points them toward their own thoughts. They're afraid of a few minutes of down-time, or any space not filled up with some tinny reification of their "identity".

"This is me: I have important business all the time, and I get calls from all my people, constantly."

"This is me, sitting at a light in my car, all the loose metal on my Buick shaking to the beat, making a show of how "into the music" I am."

"This is me, aggressively foisting all my decadent shit out onto the world, and you have to accept me this way, or I will go off on you."

"I am what I do, and my public persona is a constant show of surfaces."

Idiots. We're beings who are going to die, and we wander through life waving our hands and shouting about "being ourselves", which in the case of urban youth is a totally media-derived-and-driven fiction, as if that will forestall the inevitable, or exempt us from becoming dust. It's not being alive, it's being asleep.

Turn your cap back around (better yet, throw it away if you aren't playing baseball), pull up your pants, stop shouting, turn down the soundtrack, and just be. Just be. Impossible, I realise, but that's what I want to say. Hang up that bullshit phone, turn off the cd player, and drive the fucking car.

Ok I'm gonna go shower now.