I was driving to work, and I saw this car at a stoplight. It was a Honda Element, and on the back window were two stickers. Dead red center was a big, gaudy Harley-Davidson sticker, and in a far less flamboyant section of the window, tucked away in the bottom left, was an Apple sticker.
I don’t really know what I’m getting at, but this odd mish-mash of identities all conglomerated onto a single vehicle fascinated me to where it sparked me to actually write about it. When looking at everything as a whole, I sing the lines “one of these is NOT like the others,” and it leads me to making illogical assumptions about the person behind the wheel.
Perception is a funny thing sometimes. Apple stickers, at least to me, are somewhat of forced attempts of arrogance, status, technological savviness, wealth, or all of the above. People love to put Apple stickers onto things, so that everyone knows that they have an iPhone, iPad, iBook, or any other iDevice that’s worth boasting about owning. Personally, I couldn’t care any less about advertising for free, so I can’t say I do the same thing, but the most common place that I see Apple stickers are on peoples’ cars. And almost always on the bottom left corner of their rear windshields; sometimes on the bottom right corner, and in some rare fung shui attempts, smack in the center, just above the center window brake light.
Often times, there’s a fairly common array of vehicles that are seen wearing Apple stickers, because it’s the type of people that drive these cars that are most often the types to also love advertising for Apple. It’s not exclusive to, but the most frequently seen Apple sticker-wearers that I see are Mini Coopers, VW Bugs, Toyota Priuses, slightly older model BMWs or Audis; never one that is within current model, and, Honda Elements. Seeing the pictured Element with an Apple sticker was a no-brainer, and if not for the Harley-Davidson sticker, wouldn’t have been worth a second thought.
So it’s obvious that the oddity in this strange pairing is the Harley-Davidson sticker. Now I have nothing against Harleys, and I think motorcycles are pretty awesome machines in general. But at least in my mind, long gone are the days when the general perception of Harley-Davidsons were solely tough guys who were all Hell’s Angels or were exclusively the guys seen in Sturgis during WCW Road Wild pay-per-views. Somewhere in time, Harley-Davidson’s perception has been watered down drastically, and turned into one of the penultimate symbols of a mid-life crisis and/or the necessity to prove ones masculinity.
I’ve worked with enough middle-aged men who have fallen into the stage in their lives where they suddenly were life-long motorcycle enthusiasts out of the blue, and suddenly couldn’t stop talking about how they were going to get a Harley. Naturally, after they made their dreams realities, it was inevitable that they had to let the world know that they were into/owned a Harley, by putting the Harley-Davidson stickers on their non-Harley rides.
But most of the time, almost all of these cases, the guys were putting the Harley-Davidson paraphernalia on their large, American vehicles. Off the top of my head, I count three Ford F-150/250 trucks, an Explorer, and the one oddity being a Toyota Tacoma. But ideally, the point remains that the perception is that Harley enthusiasts also drive trucks, or some degree of vehicles with utility capabilities.
Basically, I guess what I’m getting at is that it’s a bastardized mash-up of perception and symbolism. It’s a perceived symbol of masculinity that’s been diluted (Harley-Davidson), slapped onto a perceived symbol of arrogance and materialism (Apple sticker on Honda Element). And as a whole, it’s sort of mind-boggling, to the tune of almost 850 words.
The ironic thing is that if I didn’t already know where he lived, who he was, and what he drove, I would have easily assumed that this was the personal vehicle of my old boss at ScumTrust. I like the guy a lot, and I’m still acquaintances with him today, but there’s no denying that he was both an Apple enthusiast, as well as used to own a Harley. The only thing missing would have been a Zildjian sticker.
So in the end, I have to assume that the guy driving around in this vehicle is someone kind of like my old boss, which means he’s someone in the creative industry. So in a way, I’m kind of making fun of myself, because I’m someone in the creative industry, except I don’t think I’m as materialistic and want to be a billboard for my interests. It’s someone who works on a Mac, and is old and has enough money to afford a Harley and its egregious property taxes and insurance, so he’s gotta be someone in the throes of a mid-life crisis.
Ultimately, I’m kind of guessing that he’s just one gigantic poser.
