Welcome to the Crackerdome...

I think it's high time we brought back the word "cracker." Only this time, instead of it referring to "white folk," let's focus its use on college educated, urban white people who emit a telltale aura of crackerdom.

Crackers are trapped in their own existential nausea and despite best effort, it shows. Denying the dry blankness of their existence, their thin voices, their apathetic reserve, their time-is-up-ness, crackers operate in tightly wound knots, seriously cutifying everything around them with clever word play and I'm-not-my-mom/dad,-or-am-I fashion statements. Crackers have funny Chocolate Labs with rare names taken from books. Crackers go through life with a pained expression, wandering the aisles of Whole Foods, following the dictates and fine print of logic and refinancing. They love their kids and want them to be crazy and where the wild things are and they dress them up like kooks.

But try as we crackers may to whitewash this eternally-frustrating distance from a soulful, in-the-skin existence, we just can't escape this sucking white hole we live in. There just isn't the escape velocity to set a cracker free. Or is there?

What if only us crackers can call each other crackers? What if that's the trick? It's not a pejorative slur, it's a kind of self-referential verbal meta-mirror (am I talking your language cracker?) that shows us the spinach in our teeth. It's a key to cracking the Crackerdome wide open. (Oof... And then what?)