Single, with complexes

It's also like the imaginary place imagined by noted dead author Daniel Defoe. Yes, I'm talking about Gilligan's Island. Except with no girls on it -- not even Mrs. Howell. And despite the pretentious nature of my verbose explication, three words will be sufficient to explicate what I'm (OK, OK!) ranting about here:

Radioactive Weasels from...

OK, sorry. Ryan Bigge is a man of his times, although as a post-collegiate indie-rocker, he doesn't self-identify as a "man." Rather, he's a "guy," which in his context carries something of an apology for masculinity and a promise against assertiveness. Everyone knows a bunch of these guys. They're girl worshipping and cultivate a bit of a dorky aspect. They're always getting strung along by their female friends and bullied by campus feminists. They're part of the demographic for that subgenre of action movie in which latex-clad chicks blow people away with firearms. (As Bigge notes, "I believe [Lara] Croft is a sophisticated feminist icon. By which I mean she carries a gun.") They read comics like Daniel Clowes' "Ghost World." They smoke cigarettes, masturbate and cry -- and they publish zines.

Bigge's zine was called "Single Guy," and he published it for six years, during college and after, to impress girls. He even started an indie-rock band to impress girls. All to no avail. Bigge couldn't get a girlfriend. To overuse one of his own locutions:

Ryan was sad.

Bigge is the kind of writer for whom the term "poetry" is always the same as the term "bad poetry" -- for whom "pseudo-intellectual" means the same thing as "intellectual," and everything that's not self-deprecatingly cynical is "pretentious." He falls into irreverence the way people fall off skateboards: headlong and flailingly, and without much control over where he's going to land. George Orwell is introduced as "respected dead English author George Orwell." Martin Heidegger is "dead German philosopher Martin Heidegger." He calls Naomi Klein's "No Logo" (now, mind you, this is from a former managing editor at Adbusters) an "anti-marketing screed," and summarizes the whole book thusly: "Brands are Bad."

Which pokes one in the eye a bit. Moreover, Bigge is prone to the collegiate-hipster device of preemptive self-sarcasm, subverting his own arguments before anyone else might have the chance. And as indie as he professes to be, he's much given to the vernacular of Dave Barry epigrams, "Simpsons" tropes and Letterman-style top-10 lists ("Three words: Saturday Morning Cartoons").

The reason Bigge can't find a girlfriend, he says, is postmodernism. Because once, during the decade popularly known as the 1950s, when everything was like '50s retro, except more so, and people listened to lounge music and said things like "keen" and wore hats and stuff, there were rules. And rules are bad. But maybe having some rules is better than, you know, like it is now, with no rules. Maybe dating would be less awful and humiliating for the Single Guy if things were simpler and you knew what to expect from women -- and from yourself. Bigge writes:

Postmodernism has stripped away any semblance of an understandable or sane world. The lack of rules has created a lot of romantic casualties, not to mention a new, imprecise language.

... In the 1950s, everything was black and white. If you wanted to sculpt your hair, you used Brylcreem. There was no gel, mousse, molder, spritz, defrizzer, shaper, styler, or hair cement. And if you had something to say, you said it. You took no guff. There was a rich vernacular: insouciance, peccadilloes, addlepated, moral turpitude, chaperone, licentious, vodka-sodden rake.

Addlepated? Vodka-sodden rake? Yaah, you dirty rat! We all chewed the fat suchlike, thiswise -- spoutin' a mélange of straight-shootin' rooty-toot and anachronistic book-English. Pass thou the hair pomade, my good man, and dontcha gimme no guff.

Next page: Who did this to you, Ryan Bigge?