Don’t Say It If You Don’t Mean It…
I complain a lot. I know this. I do it because I like it. There’s a very specific reason behind it as well. It’s a given that it doesn’t matter what you say, really, people will invariably like it or hate it and pass judgment upon it verbally or mentally in the seconds that follow you speaking. The problem with people is that they never want to hear you when you say something good; they only pay attention when you say something bad. I get people who ask me why I complain a lot, and it baffles me because, back when I wasn’t complaining, they weren’t listening and were too busy complaining about what I liked to begin with. Yeah, I like the color pink, red, orange, green, gray, and yellow. In that order. Sure, I like things that don’t make sense. I mention something I like and fifteen people decide to tell me the top ten reasons they hate it, yet conversely, I say something like: I can’t fucking stand Transformers, and fifty thousand people say ‘Oh stop your whining’.
To the point though, a lot of people in my life tell me what I should be doing with my life. While I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, I do have a problem with what I’m called to do. It’s that kind of empty notion simple. That last sentence made no sense and it wasn’t supposed to. People tell me day in and day out that I need to ‘do something with my writing’. They leave me little sentimental nothings like ‘You’re really good, you should take that someplace.’
And my unending, yet unspoken, reply is: Take it where? Across the street; to the mall; to Hamby’s Eatery? When people say things like that, they never think through the implications of such a statement. What is it they assume I should be writing? I certainly can’t get anywhere by canonizing a tome of my random journal musings, short-stories or Brain Spew ™ that I’m known for scribbling. Sure, I could write a book, but about what? They always tell me what I should do, but they don’t ever tell me what they expect of me. While that’s not really necessary for a writer to perform, it certainly helps to know what people have in mind when they whisper little nuggets like that into your ear. Sure it’s encouraging; sure I enjoy the compliments from friends and people I don’t know alike. Sure I appreciate the fact that the people my own age who read my spew often have parents who read it as well. Sure I appreciate the advice I get from said parents. But what’s it doing for me? I’ve been writing in quite the same fashion since I was in seventh grade English and have been hearing the same things since then. The first short story I ever wrote got me an opportunity to turn down a chance to read it before a student body.
Why turn down such an opportunity? Well, I’ve come to realize something about myself and people like me: We’re all very, very weird. No one with a brain is normal, that’s the beauty of gray matter. When it’s working overtime, it doesn’t do what everyone else’s does and for that I’m thankful. We don’t ‘hang out’, we don’t keep hosts of friends, and we don’t often eat or sleep. The only thing we do seem to have an affinity for is bad habits that plague us throughout adulthood. Mine is disliking things that are perceived normal. Not mainstream, just normal. While I hate a lot of things, I love a lot of things too, I even love some of the things I hate, if that makes any sense. I hate words like ‘love’, ‘caring’, ‘OK’, ‘totally’ and ‘neck’. I hate clichés with a passion. At the same time, however, I often use them in sentences. I often joke with clichés. Hell, I even write with them sometimes. They’re unavoidable nuances of the English diction and the English speaking culture.
Furthermore, what’s the point of such a thankless career choice? Is there room for people to just ‘like things’ anymore? The future is one built on the foundation of cynical, emotional distrust. Suspending belief is a hard thing to do when you have cheesy shit like ‘The Matrix’ popping onto the big screen and showing us that doing things in slow motion is ‘cool’. Or books like ‘The Da Vinci Code’ teaching us that paranoia is nothing but guised suspense. Not that any of these things are good or bad in and of themselves, but they breed disinterest. Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow’s another perfect example. The movie looked like one big Final Fantasy cut scene on crack, but people still loved it. I didn’t but they did. Why I didn’t like it? It looked too generic. I’d have been ten times more impressed if they brought back the era of such writing and movies by using actual things and props instead of filming it all on a Blue Screen and creating it all several weeks later on three hundred PCs.
There isn’t a writer or creator on the planet who doesn’t have a belly full of people who eat, drink, live and sleep simply to badmouth their work and expose flaws in it to the public to garner laughs and pool hatred. People like that make me not even want to bother. Hell, I’m one of them. There’s nothing more fun (admit it you sick monkeys) than sitting around with a gaggle of friends and utterly tearing something that someone else made apart. Sure it increases your social skills, but it probably removes wrinkles from your brain that can only be replaced by reading more of what you hate. So no, this isn’t me saying ‘I’m so damn great’, this is me saying ‘I’m probably not good enough- and neither is anyone else’. Mankind is fickle. Fuck ‘em, I say. People invariably don’t deserve anything entertaining.
We should just give them more shit to complain about. Politics, the Occult, paranoia, UFOs, bad fanfiction, terrible rap lyrics, shitty concerto’s performed by Wish-They-Were-Bach composures like John Tesh, weak hypnotic techno music by bands named after VD, war, bloodshed, violence, terrorism, airport security, dancing hampsters, All Your Base, stupid T-shirts, religious zealots, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, homosexuals, metrosexuals, black people, white people, oriental people, bad drivers, prostitutes, pimps, pollution, the ozone layer, UV rays, firework factory explosions, disappointing school plays, bad singers, shitty pop music, anime, fist fights at Mervyn’s, people who can’t spell, people who can’t talk, immigrants, farmers, zoophiles, unnecessarily long Stephen King books (did you catch me?), and crack cocaine.
This is the part where you comment you fickle pickles.
Hybrid: Out.
To the point though, a lot of people in my life tell me what I should be doing with my life. While I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, I do have a problem with what I’m called to do. It’s that kind of empty notion simple. That last sentence made no sense and it wasn’t supposed to. People tell me day in and day out that I need to ‘do something with my writing’. They leave me little sentimental nothings like ‘You’re really good, you should take that someplace.’
And my unending, yet unspoken, reply is: Take it where? Across the street; to the mall; to Hamby’s Eatery? When people say things like that, they never think through the implications of such a statement. What is it they assume I should be writing? I certainly can’t get anywhere by canonizing a tome of my random journal musings, short-stories or Brain Spew ™ that I’m known for scribbling. Sure, I could write a book, but about what? They always tell me what I should do, but they don’t ever tell me what they expect of me. While that’s not really necessary for a writer to perform, it certainly helps to know what people have in mind when they whisper little nuggets like that into your ear. Sure it’s encouraging; sure I enjoy the compliments from friends and people I don’t know alike. Sure I appreciate the fact that the people my own age who read my spew often have parents who read it as well. Sure I appreciate the advice I get from said parents. But what’s it doing for me? I’ve been writing in quite the same fashion since I was in seventh grade English and have been hearing the same things since then. The first short story I ever wrote got me an opportunity to turn down a chance to read it before a student body.
Why turn down such an opportunity? Well, I’ve come to realize something about myself and people like me: We’re all very, very weird. No one with a brain is normal, that’s the beauty of gray matter. When it’s working overtime, it doesn’t do what everyone else’s does and for that I’m thankful. We don’t ‘hang out’, we don’t keep hosts of friends, and we don’t often eat or sleep. The only thing we do seem to have an affinity for is bad habits that plague us throughout adulthood. Mine is disliking things that are perceived normal. Not mainstream, just normal. While I hate a lot of things, I love a lot of things too, I even love some of the things I hate, if that makes any sense. I hate words like ‘love’, ‘caring’, ‘OK’, ‘totally’ and ‘neck’. I hate clichés with a passion. At the same time, however, I often use them in sentences. I often joke with clichés. Hell, I even write with them sometimes. They’re unavoidable nuances of the English diction and the English speaking culture.
Furthermore, what’s the point of such a thankless career choice? Is there room for people to just ‘like things’ anymore? The future is one built on the foundation of cynical, emotional distrust. Suspending belief is a hard thing to do when you have cheesy shit like ‘The Matrix’ popping onto the big screen and showing us that doing things in slow motion is ‘cool’. Or books like ‘The Da Vinci Code’ teaching us that paranoia is nothing but guised suspense. Not that any of these things are good or bad in and of themselves, but they breed disinterest. Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow’s another perfect example. The movie looked like one big Final Fantasy cut scene on crack, but people still loved it. I didn’t but they did. Why I didn’t like it? It looked too generic. I’d have been ten times more impressed if they brought back the era of such writing and movies by using actual things and props instead of filming it all on a Blue Screen and creating it all several weeks later on three hundred PCs.
There isn’t a writer or creator on the planet who doesn’t have a belly full of people who eat, drink, live and sleep simply to badmouth their work and expose flaws in it to the public to garner laughs and pool hatred. People like that make me not even want to bother. Hell, I’m one of them. There’s nothing more fun (admit it you sick monkeys) than sitting around with a gaggle of friends and utterly tearing something that someone else made apart. Sure it increases your social skills, but it probably removes wrinkles from your brain that can only be replaced by reading more of what you hate. So no, this isn’t me saying ‘I’m so damn great’, this is me saying ‘I’m probably not good enough- and neither is anyone else’. Mankind is fickle. Fuck ‘em, I say. People invariably don’t deserve anything entertaining.
We should just give them more shit to complain about. Politics, the Occult, paranoia, UFOs, bad fanfiction, terrible rap lyrics, shitty concerto’s performed by Wish-They-Were-Bach composures like John Tesh, weak hypnotic techno music by bands named after VD, war, bloodshed, violence, terrorism, airport security, dancing hampsters, All Your Base, stupid T-shirts, religious zealots, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, homosexuals, metrosexuals, black people, white people, oriental people, bad drivers, prostitutes, pimps, pollution, the ozone layer, UV rays, firework factory explosions, disappointing school plays, bad singers, shitty pop music, anime, fist fights at Mervyn’s, people who can’t spell, people who can’t talk, immigrants, farmers, zoophiles, unnecessarily long Stephen King books (did you catch me?), and crack cocaine.
This is the part where you comment you fickle pickles.
Hybrid: Out.