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I was driving to work, and I saw this car at a stoplight.\u00a0 It was a Honda Element, and on the back window were two stickers.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n I don\u2019t really know what I\u2019m 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.\u00a0 When looking at everything as a whole, I sing the lines \u201cone of these is NOT like the others,<\/em>\u201d and it leads me to making illogical assumptions about the person behind the wheel.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Perception is a funny thing sometimes.\u00a0 Apple stickers, at least to me, are somewhat of forced attempts of arrogance, status, technological savviness, wealth, or all of the above.\u00a0 People\u00a0love<\/em>\u00a0to put Apple stickers onto things, so that everyone knows that they have an iPhone, iPad, iBook, or any other iDevice that\u2019s worth boasting about owning. Personally, I couldn\u2019t care any less about advertising for free, so I can\u2019t say I do the same thing, but the most common place that I see Apple stickers are on peoples\u2019 cars.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Often times, there\u2019s a fairly common array of vehicles that are seen wearing Apple stickers, because it\u2019s the type of people that drive these cars that are most often the types to also love advertising for Apple.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Seeing the pictured Element with an Apple sticker was a no-brainer, and if not for the Harley-Davidson sticker, wouldn\u2019t have been worth a second thought.<\/span><\/p>\n So it\u2019s obvious that the oddity in this strange pairing is the Harley-Davidson sticker.\u00a0 Now I have nothing against Harleys, and I think motorcycles are pretty awesome machines in general.\u00a0 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\u2019s Angels or were exclusively the guys seen in Sturgis during WCW Road Wild pay-per-views.\u00a0 Somewhere in time, Harley-Davidson\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve 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\u2019t stop talking about how they were going to get a Harley.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n But most of the time, almost all of these cases, the guys were putting the Harley-Davidson paraphernalia on their large, American vehicles.\u00a0 Off the top of my head, I count three Ford F-150\/250 trucks, an Explorer, and the one oddity being a Toyota Tacoma.\u00a0 But ideally, the point remains that the perception is that Harley enthusiasts also drive trucks, or some degree of vehicles with utility capabilities.<\/span><\/p>\n Basically, I guess what I\u2019m getting at is that it\u2019s a bastardized mash-up of perception and symbolism.\u00a0 It\u2019s a perceived symbol of masculinity that\u2019s been diluted (Harley-Davidson), slapped onto a perceived symbol of arrogance and materialism (Apple sticker on Honda Element).\u00a0 And as a whole, it\u2019s sort of mind-boggling, to the tune of almost 850 words.<\/span><\/p>\n The ironic thing is that if I didn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 I like the guy a lot, and I\u2019m still acquaintances with him today, but there\u2019s no denying that he was both an Apple enthusiast, as well as used to own a Harley.\u00a0 The only thing missing would have been a Zildjian sticker.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019s someone in the creative industry.\u00a0 So in a way, I\u2019m kind of making fun of myself, because I\u2019m someone in the creative industry, except I don\u2019t think I\u2019m as materialistic and want to be a billboard for my interests.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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\u2019s gotta be someone in the throes of a mid-life crisis.<\/span><\/p>\n Ultimately, I\u2019m kind of guessing that he\u2019s just one gigantic poser.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was driving to work, and I saw this car at a stoplight.\u00a0 It was a Honda Element, and on the back window were two stickers.\u00a0 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. … Continue reading Just doesn\u2019t really seem right<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[131,51,45,83,15],"class_list":["post-35362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-branding","tag-cars","tag-fail","tag-observations","tag-og"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35362"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35364,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35362\/revisions\/35364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}