paganbabies
Inaugural Ball
The topic I have chosen for my inaugural article had better be a good one. As the first article, this writing sets the tenor for all that follows. If I get too heady, readers will think I'm another overbearing pseudointellectual, the type of person who too often uses the word “pseudointellectual,” the type of person who, armed with an unabridged dictionary and access to Wikipedia, pretends he already knew everything about Sartre's hypothesis that we're all impersonating an identity when in reality he spent ten minutes looking around the internet for something like “Sartre's hypothesis that we're all impersonating an identity“ so he could write this very sentence. If I go the other direction and try to plumb the lowest common denominator, it's only a matter of months before things devolve into bukkake pr0nography and pop-ups for those fucking smiley emoticon faces – who gets those things? Are people paying for animated GIF's? And those goddamned free iPods. I don't care if those referral programs do work; they've already pissed me off enough - I'm boycotting Apple. Lucky for them I don't have any money to spend with their competition.
I also have to be sure to be funny. Humor is the only thing (besides bare breasts) with any staying power on the internet. There is a glut of political writing out there already, and let's face it: people who want to read political writing are boring. And static -- the lefty readers of Common Dreams will continue to kill babies while saving the whales, and watchers of Fox News will go on killing brown people while saving their money. There are plenty of other pinkos like me out there writing; I wont jump in that pool. I do, however, reserve the right to invoke the freedoms granted me by Heading 2 § 2 of the paganbabies Premises Charter of 2006, which in essence states that I can write about what-the-fuck-ever I want to write about.
But I digress.
To get back to the topic at hand, that topic being what the topic of this article should be, I am aware that I have used a tired bit of recursive humor; I have made the topic a question of itself as topic. Such cheap plays often fall into infinite loops which, while they demonstrate some principles of deconstruction, are generally void of anything interesting. I'm getting too heady; I've had to use Wikipedia twice already to write this paragraph. Let's dumb-down for a bit: You totally should have seen this one thing this one guy at my work did the other day or was it last week? Anyway he was pushing a stroller but his kid wasn't in it or whatever and he ran the thing right into a rack of dishes and like six or seven of them fell and smashed in the aisle. He totally got all red and was all "Can you give me a hand?" and I was like "No way I'm cleaning that up." Then he went and found someone else I think because when I came back like an hour later it wasn't there but man those were like $30 plates.
I've written myself into a bit of a dead end; I've openly established that my topic is aimless. But, as a student of English, everything I've ever written has been missing a real topic. I pride myself on my ability to write ten pages or speak for half an hour and say almost nothing. The difference is that I have here admitted openly to having no point. For those of my readers who may be less experienced with, but might one day find themselves in such situations as the one in which I presently find myself, the key to moving forward is to keep writing - even (especially) if that means you choose a direction that is only tangential to whatever is the matter at hand. As an example, you'll see here that I can make my topic about tangents themselves. Tangents, you will remember, are small purple fruits, first harvested in the Philippines, but which have since been domesticated globally. A great source of folic acid.
But the topic of this article is not "helping you to become a better writer." I know most of you don't even read. ["Oh, Brock, I'm reading this, aren't I?" Yeah. Fucking hilarious.] No, in the end this article serves only one purpose, to establish this practice, this place, this task of writing one public article a month. It may not reach many people, and I certainly wont stand out among the 412% of people who now maintain blogs, but five years from now, I will get to read 60,000 words on what I thought over the past 5 years. Not that I will want to. That's about half a novel. And who can be certain? I might get syndicated. I sure as shit deserve it more than the xenophobic christ-bots like Cal Thomas and (the person I fear in a way I've never known fear before) Ann Coulter.
 Cal |
 Diabolus |
..fuck. I went political. I'm sorry. But look at her cold robot stare. One can't talk sense to a robot. Their beliefs are pre-programmed. And they eat old people's medicine for fuel. I don't even know why the scientists make them.
The reason I could never get a syndicated column, aside from the fact that Nobody agrees with my politics, is that syndicated writers have a well defined target audience, one that shares a common background knowledge and a rather (at least loosely) defined ideology. Me, I'm all over the place. I can't make a cogent argument, I lack direction and coherence, my grammar is flawed (dangling modifiers left and right), and I have bad handwriting. Plus I drink.
So I am self-syndicating. Hello, world.
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
std::cout << "Hello, world!\n";
}
-bj- |