I was up in a hot air balloon today. I won’t bore you with the wonder and niceness of it all. And I won’t pretend that the pilot was a paradigm of the stereotypical outdoor adventurous type of bloke. But he did, in his own innocuous and inoffensive way, carry with him a few of the traits that make most of these types quite tediously fucking annoying.
I’ll be frank. I believe that people with the LEAST capacity to be interesting feel the MOST compunction to involve themselves in adventurous pastimes and extreme sports, just so that they can PRETEND that they’re NOT boring. In fact, it PERFECTLY GIVES THEM THE RIGHT to accuse all of us less adventurous types of BEING BORING. These charmless oafs have cashed in personality for a life of adrenalin-chasing pursuits and forever chant their fatuous mantras in our faces: LIVE LIFE TO THE MAX!
Fuck off!
Sub-dividing this socially retarded species into two, we find that there are LEADERS and DO-ERS. The Do-ers just pay to do it. They turn up with bleached blonde hair and Chinese tattoos and all the right clothing to either bungee or surf or quad-bike or snow-board or whatever other WANKY bit of DICKING about makes them feel like they have BIG COCKS. And they start every conversation with, “I’m a bit of an adrenalin-junkie.” A bit of a twat, I then think.
I mix my tiny shot of jealousy with a large tonic of pity for these stereotypes. My chief disdain is reserved for the leaders. The men (I have nothing against the women) who fly the balloons, run the bungee club or teach others how to windsurf or paraglide or jet-ski or generally TRY TO LOOK COOL at either a huge height or break-neck speed.
These blokes tend to have beards. Bill Bailey types. A bit Dungeons and Dragons, but less insipidly stay-at-home pale. And slightly BO-whiffy. And they have this ENORMOUS knowledge of BOLLOCK-BORING stuff about their specialist adventurous pastime AND about EVERYTHING ELSE EVER that you’re likely to talk about when you’re outside the house. And they want to just talk AT you when you make that fatal mistake of naively asking a question to which a simple YES or NO answer would suffice. The sort of question that they interpret as PLEASE TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING SO THAT I CAN BE IMPRESSED BY YOU. (In a way that no one was impressed by them at school, when they were bullied and smelt quite BO-whiffy then too.)
There’s a galling sort of arrogance that comes with such a compendium of boring knowledge, so much so that you want to pour petrol on the bastard’s fleece and set him alight. Especially when he continues to fire off droll comments at your expense to belittle you and make you feel less of an interesting person because you’re just doing whatever dicking adventure thing it is just the ONCE and he does it all the time. And has a t-shirt saying as much. “I DO IT TEN TIMES A DAY.”
But he actually looks like he didn’t have sex until he was 32 and since then he and his gruesomely wretched-looking wife have gone the whole hog and become sex people, going to swinger parties with other couples that they know from the pub quiz in the village local. Yuk.
But anyway, like I said, I wouldn’t like to attribute all these qualities to my hot air balloon pilot today as he was barely scratching the surface of the stereotype. But he WAS called Gary and I bet they’re all called Gary aren’t they?
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