Lent #20 – Lameness, or a thickly vieled parody?

I know what you're thinkin', you're thinkin', "Oh that Eugene, phonin' it in again" But probably with more "g"s and less apostrophes. Instead, though, I challenge you to consider this: think of all those shirts out there with odd, almost-but-not-quite recognizable images, whose heavily funded and overpriced marketing department THRIVES on their very indecipherability. "The image is because!" They'll claim, gleefully. Whatever the fuck that means. These images are, like the one above, touted like an iconographic Avatar some unknown culture's god, isolated from composition, context, or even texturization; perfect unto iteslf, or so it's assumed by way of majority consensus and commercial suggestion. Then they hike the price until it becomes expensive enough to be important, and suddenly it's the new Thing Of The Week.

Now...I suppose the Hot Topic generation has pretty much anihilated this form of psychological terror that shirt makers visisted upon the late 90's. "Thanks be to God!" you might declare, but O! I say unto you: lament instead. For within this demon's ashes rises another. In place of meaningless symbols, we now have artificially-weathered, faux-retro, sentimental references to the crappy shit we watched when we were too young to be capable of separating delicious pizza from quality narrative. Will the suffering never end? Will it?

It willn't!

Actually, I still can't separate delicious pizza from quality narrative, so maybe that's just a thing.
Forget I said any of this.