I owe eternal thanks to Mountain Dew, which had a commercial that first got me to consider: "being cool is a state of mind." Coolness is like righteousness. You know where you stand, but that gets lost in the shuffle of everyone else trying to tell you what you should think.

This whole hip-hop crap-rap movement is one big sales Club of Cool. We have "fashionably" clad rappers acting outrageously and pretending to have fortunes and women falling at their feet. If they are pretending, then from where do they get their power? Answer: from every teenage kid in the world who is not cool but wants to be.

Buy their music CD, buy their off-the-buttcheek pants, buy their hairstyle - you too can own some stock in the cool movement. It is all part of the same big pyramid scam of acceptance. You too can be cool, if you just adopt the ignorant approach to everything, particularly misspelling and subspeech. Yo be-otch that's phat. U R a sw33t EZ fr34ky h0e.
Whassuuuuuuupp.

The uncool teenage slice of our population is a huge market for repeat revenues. Define cool as something that's ever-changing, and the sheep must spend their wages every time the flava of the month changes.

Dre is the man. No wait, it's Snoop. Now it's Warren. Or is it Afro Puffs Dyke? If you buy one, you have to upgrade to the buddy and brother and sista add-ons, batteries not included, and even if they were they wouldn't be cool next month.

Woah, now we got a whole Cool Thang Clan. Sell the whole posse and just rotate who's a member by politics. Sell the drama of who threatened who, who went to jail, who has the pimpest tight wheelz, and who really busted a cap - not just crap rapped about it. I'm hard; I'm ghetto; you can be cool if your wallet is agile and generous enough.

Sorry fellas, but you cannot sell me coolness. I ain't buying. My clothes were fashionable ten years ago; my hair, fifteen. That's just me. I will not aspire to be JayZee or whatever the initials of the month are. Even Groucho Marx could see through that one: "I would never join a club that would have me as a member."

Sometimes I think that all the sheep who buy into that futile bull should just have a big sign on their foreheads so I know to avoid them. But then I realize: they do! Everyone wearing pants that sag below boxers, sporting Asian tattoos they don't understand, touting senseless phrases corrupted from honest language, or mashing keys lazily instead of typing as if they were educated.

So I'd like to thank the Club of Cool for branding all the fools out there. Life is so much easier when things are clearly labeled. Know what I'm sayin'? Peace out, G.