Lawton’s Illiterate Karen’s Have No Sense of Humor

If you're reading these words right now, congrats on not being the type of smooth-brained genius that makes a snap opinionated judgment from just a headline. Even at a point in human history where we should be more intelligent than ever before, the population of comprehensive illiterate people is growing.

Let me begin with reintroducing myself. My name is Jeff, said in that 21 Jump Street fashion, but everyone I know has called me Kelso since I was thirteen years old.

Before you ask, yes, it's because my actual last name is super-close to the character's name on That 70's Show, which was super popular, at least in my town. The kind of place where nobody goes by their real name, everybody had a nickname. Oddly enough, our friend Kyle was called Timmy, and we always called Tim "Steve." Don't know why, that's just the backstory to why everyone had nicknames.

If you don't already know this, I work for Z94. I'm the guy on the radio between Bob & Tom in the mornings and Critter in the afternoons. I mean, technically I work for KLAW101 and 1073PopCrush too, but Z94 has always been my home.

Collectively, the stations are owned by Townsquare Media, and because everyone at the top of the company came here oddly enough from AOL (it's still a working business in 2021) the emphasis we get from on-high is "Blog posts are the future." Whether I agree or not doesn't matter, I'm required the same as all TSM employees to write at least two blogs per day to appease our innovated-bias overlords.

I've been fortunate enough to make a living making fart and male genitalia jokes into a microphone for the past seventeen years, but as I dip further and further into the web with my personal brand of blogging, that hill gets steeper. It's like the government purposely breeds Karen's and I can't figure out why they take me so seriously.

Example: The other day I was cruising around the web looking for some random topic to do one of my required posts about, and I stumbled on a hilarious stat about Lawton. It appeared on one sites "Best Places To Live In America" list. What made it funny was, it was listed as the 10,429th best place to live in the United States....

I'm still giggling at that now as I type it again. It's hilarious. Who knew lists like that even went that high?

Naturally, because we live in a time when stupidity is fashionable among the smooth-brained, some would read the accurate and true headline that Lawton Lands On Best Places To Live In America List and instantly go off on this self-absorbed campaign of bashing it across a few social media platforms.

Normally, I wouldn't give it a second thought. Being a radio guy, I believe in that old-school Howard Stern mentality... I'd rather a million Karen's click my stuff because they hate it rather than a thousand adoring fans click it because they love it. Whatever it takes to get enough clicks to keep the coffee-breathed New Yorker corporate overlords from breathing down my neck, I don't care how I get 'em... but when emails start coming in about how I'm doing more harm than good in "painting Lawton as a nice place to live." I'm guessing it was a coordinated Karen attack, because of the nearly two hundred I received, they were almost completely identical in their message.

It wasn't more-or-less the message, like I said, I don't care if someone disagrees with me... but it was truly amazing how either one really bored person came up with and sent so many emails having an issue with a four-hundred-word joke I posted on the internet, or how so many different characteristically unhappy (now we know why they're) forever-single people organized and took issue with something they legitimately either didn't read for themselves or those barely-passing school grades are showing in their lack of reading comprehension.

Either way, I really don't have an interest in getting to the bottom of it or trying to address our differences in a polite and courteous way... I really just didn't have anything to blog about today, so I figured I talk about the big-foreheaded Cro-Magnon population of Karen's we have in Lawton as I stroll through 800 words on the website.

If you stuck in this long, I really do appreciate it. You know what they say, ten thousand clicks a day keeps the New Jersey away... Again, not worried about them reading this and getting their probably overpriced name-brand undies in a bunch... they only read the headlines too.