where in the world is matt lauer's detailed explanation for existence?

have you ever felt so completely neutral toward someone that over time, you end up hating them just because they become a regular part of your routine? seems like every weekday i wake up, eat my bagel and shmear, and watch the boob tube. somehow i always end up with the damn today show on and every evening such as this one, i cannot recall why or how it happened. most of it is a blur, except for this ubiquitous "news" personality:

in my lucid memory, he feels like a very solid part of my day. always there. so much so that it pisses me off to no end. i sit here remembering my morning and all that fills my head is a cream cheese-flavored matt lauer. that's it.

so i try to think about specifics. i delve into figuring out what characteristics matt lauer possesses that continually push him into my daily recollections. i think SUPER hard and the ONLY thing that comes to mind is his DAMN smile. THAT'S it. NOTHING else. sure, now that he's begun his "where in the world is matt lauer?" bit, i now know random facts about easter island and the panama canal, but he only goes there - he does not provide these gems of knowledge. we learn about all this stuff from the smart people he happens upon whereever he may go. therefore, i still know NOTHING about the enigma that is lauer.

"what about that tom cruise thing?" you ask. THAT'S the thing. does anyone actually REMEMBER what the crap lauer said? or anything about his life? if i think really hard, i think his beef was not even that HE knew someone who was on ritalin, but that he knew someone that knew someone that was on ritalin - their kid or something.

my hypothesis is this: MATT LAUER as we know him today is not a real human being. this is not a revelatory post, i assure you. an absurd amount of morning show personalities along with lauer are forgettable and only mere conduits of infotainment (very possibly all of them). yet unlike the rest, matt lauer has the divine ability to lock into people's brains without actually rising above or falling below the mediocrity that is early morning broadcast television.

so the mystery of course is HOW he does this. the ONLY thing about him that i recall at the end of the day is the impenetrable lauer smile. THIS cannot be behind all of this madness, can it?

i think it would possible if his smile was very gummy and alien-like such as this, but no, matt's smile is just fine. big, but not too big. wide, but not too wide. he probably had a damn fucking good yearbook picture.

what on earth could it be then? the only thing i've got against the guy is that i know nothing about him and yet he pervades every weekday morning of mine with an unhate-able smile. is that enough to ever so slowly transform my non-relationship with lauer into a burning hatred?

yet i got no beef with couric, roker, the rest of the gang. why? because couric is annoying and has weird skin lines that aren't quite wrinkles and aren't quite plastic surgery marks. she's obviously hate-able. roker's jolly and he's on conan a lot. can't complain with that. and he's black. black + jolly + conan = obviously unhate-able.

in sum, men such as lauer are either nothingness or everythingness. probably both. their pasts could be erased and they would not be missed, but they would still be lodged in between that short-lived dinosaur cereal and the incredibly smooth rock i found in montana that one time in my permanent memory. congratulations you son of a bitch.

This entry was posted by chris, on Tuesday, November 08, 2005. You can leave your response.