Hotan with his girlfriend Cassandra and an actual teenager (left).
Report by JOHN HOGAN
Yesterday, Juan Hotan, of Valouria, New Jersey, finally broke down and visited the local West Coast Video. This primarily East Coast video store chain obviously thrives on confusion and perversion, otherwise it would be called "East Coast Video". In keeping with the spirit of this establishment, Juan rented several videos that threw him into a pit of impotent helplessness. His psychological trauma was triggered by watching approximately twelve consecutive hours of teensploitation movies, including Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, 10 Things I Hate About You and Clueless.
Juan's friends and family were concerned. Here was a healthy young man on the verge of adulthood. He had a mere two months before he graduated from the airplane steward academy, and he was really "finding his place in this world, in terms of fashion," according to his good friend Bob Hanky, a mop-top sixteen year old from Boonton.
What would inspire such ravenous self-destruction as to surrender a rich experiential existence to one of two dimensional, cathode-ray keg parties and RGB voyeurism? Juan's girlfriend Cassandra had this much to say: "When you think about the actors in these teensploitation films, they are very often in their twenties anyway. There is a whole tradition of twenty-year olds pretending to be teenagers. Juan is just catching up so that he can engage in the discourse."
Hotan's mother had a different opinion. "He's going through a sad time right now. He's on the cusp of actually having to earn a living, which requires a modicum of maturity. Something which Juan has not developed. Now would be the time for him to do that, but Instead he's just indulging in countless hours ogling girls on television and longing for his teenage years. The funny part is that he never did anything interesting when he really was that age. He just sat around and watched MTV."
Despite this seemingly desparate position, some experts maintain that there is hope for Hotan, if he eventually finds something to occupy his time. "We've been trying to get him interested in the internet," Hanky maintains, "and there's a lot of opportunity there for both immersing himself in a meaningless vortex of hedonistic shit, and for developing useful skills that will help him be more savvy to our contemporary world."
