saint_monkey

soon after moving to philadelphia, i began to notice something. people in philadelphia can't drive, or at least, they can't drive according to the rules of prudence and common sense. the sheer lack of twisted metal along every major freeway indicates that at the very least, the people here possess some degree of hand-eye coordination and providencial luck that protects them from harm... "God watches over drunks and little children" the old saying goes... i might add philadelphians to the list.

so soon after i arrived i became quite used to some of the most brazen acts of driving that i have ever seen, but from time to time, someone would come up with something totally new, totally inventive, and completely reckless and foolish. Something that would gain an incredible advantage for the perpetrator, but almost kill everyone in every car around them. in short, something that raises "obnoxious" to the level of an art form.

for a little while i thought it was just an illusion, but careful observation bore out my assumptions. it seemed that every time someone trumped my expected level of freeway idiocy, they would have a round, black and white sticker on the back of their obligatory SUV that said "OBX."

This puzzled me. Since these people seemed to pride themseves on being OBNOXIOUS, i thought that this must be some cult of the obnoxious, that graced thier car with a sort of Masonic symbol with the three abreviated letters of thier religion. But the stickers were too hokey for that... they seemed modeled off of the old european import stickers that you would sometimes see on old SAABs that had been lovingly carted around the world by thier hippie owners. my old "enrichment" teacher had a SAAB with a "DDR" import sticker, showing that she had at some point, taken her car into germany and back out. Such stickers are a symbol of brand loyalty to its extreme. "I love my car so much, i took it to holland with me, rather than rent a mini while i was there." Later, countries like Ireland (IRL) began marketing its stickers to tourists, realizing that people would look at the stickers, wonder where the car had been for a second, and then the "Oh! Ireland!" moment would happen, planting the seed for another potential Irish vacation. I have also seen counterculture absortption of this type of import sticker, especially the IRL sticker, waggishly altered to IRE, a word used by the "Jah" cult in Jamaica. Later permutations changed the black on white IRE to a red, green and yellow IRE, to match the Jamaican flag. So a jump to an OBX = OBNOXIOUS sticker isn't too far off base, especially with counterculture absorption of mainstream adhesives.... In seattle, I would frequently find gang tags and drug markers on altered FEDEX and USPS stickers.

It took a while to get close enough to one fo the stickers to examine it and determine the truth. It seemed like there were no cars with this sticker in any of the places i frequented. None in my blue collar neighborhood, none in any of the areas i drove restlessly through... these stickers were always on the move, but never in my neighborhood. The OBX cult moved in circles that only rarely intersected my own.

It wasn't till i started working in Cherry Hill NJ that i got close enough to an SUV weilding the OBX sticker, parked in one of the "Reserved" spaces where I work. There, along the bottom of the sticker, was my answer. Written in much smaller letters, it said "Outer Banx, North Carolina." I was so close. What i had failed to realize is that this type of thing progresses along a very specific path. A phenomenon is at first interesting for its oddity, then it becomes incorporated into a counterculture, then it becomes "edgy" and finally "cool." Once something becomes "cool" forget it, it becomes a target for the mainstream, and for mainstram corruption and absorption. (This idea is known as "phenomonology" and perhaps one of it's most interesting studies is the "OBEY GIANT" stickering campaign started by silkscreener Sheppard Fairey in order to promote his art and skills. it worked. have you seen the new "Mountain Dew" labels, the ones where "DEW" spells "MAD" if the can is turned upside down? the work of Mr. Fairey, who was hired to do the labels for the new cans, soley based on his "Giant" work.) I hadn't taken it far enough. The tourist trap areas of the outer banks had clearly co-opted the irish idea, and came up with the idea of marketing the outer banks as another country. (Forget the idea that anyplace worth going in the outer banks is only reachable by boat, and once you get there, everything is within walking distance, so vehicle import stickers would be useless.) So what I thought was a cult symbol, a counterculture absorption of the mainstream, turned out to be shared tourista crap among the bobos rich enough to vacation along the Outer Banks. This set would be (barely) old enough to attach "Cool" to the old import stickers, obnoxious enough to commit the extreme driving offenses i had witnessed, and uncaring enough to display their affluence in yet another way that the working joes could not.

On second thought, perhaps the OBX stickers really are an indicator of the cult of the obnoxious...