Social interaction has become for me a party game.
There is one in particular that I have in mind, but I never learned its name. Its part of a collection of party games for the Playstation. Probably 4. Maybe 3. I don't remember. But it's kind of Cards Against Humanity. The point isn't so much the game as its point system. You just had to be funny.
And the way funny works, the best I can tell, is through the Element of Surprise. This seems to be at the root of whatever clever means: surprising. And it's how punchlines work – they're described in fighting terms for a reason. A well-landed joke has basically the same effect on the body as a punch to the gut. You've heard of gut-busting laughter. Or doubling over laughing.
There are rules. Like the rule of threes – any good punchline gets diminishing returns after the third repetition. But basically it seems to me that the goal of any game like Cards Against Humanity – or whatever the game I'm actually thinking of – is to surprise the other players with your answers. I don't like CAH because games can be so subjective. The game I'm thinking of, the players each answer each category in secret, then vote for their favorite in secret. Then the votes are tallied and points assigned. I don't remember whether it was points per vote or points to the highest tally. Doesn't matter.
Social interaction has become for me that game.
I don't know what that means, but I know that when I wrote it down the other day – after it had been playing in repeat in the back of my head from the time I woke up – it felt right. And now that I've come back to it to ask whether I understand what it means, I find that I'm in the same place I started.
There's a metaphor for my art in that sentence, but I'm going to focus.
I don't really know what it means. But I think I know what I was trying to tell myself when I wrote it down.
You could be dominant at that game exactly one time.
Then the rest of the players would hedge their bets and choose less funny answers to freeze you out.
I am a competitive person. I grew up playing sports – football; baseball and basketball weren't physical enough for me; I got ejected from my only what do they call it? In-field homerun? Idk. I didn't knock the ball out of the park, but I did beat it back to the catcher... actually, I didn't do that, either. The ball reached the catcher when I was halfway to the base and I made the business decision to run through him to the base, thinking I could knock the ball away with my shoulder.
So that's what I did.
He went one way, the ball went the other, and I landed on home plate.
But I got ejected.
So baseball wasn't for me.
And I knew better than to use my physicality in basketball. I loved wrestling in middle school.
Anyway. I'm competitive. My father was former military. It's something I just have to live with. I mostly deal with it by not competing (but also being mindful that not competing can be considered arrogance if you're not competing because you already believe you're better). So I've spent thirty-some years reminding myself I'm not good enough to be in any conversation, playing any game, with anyone.
I dominated the first game of Whatever It's Called I played. Crushed it. Basically took a clean sweep.
Cus you can play to the room. I watched a game, saw what they thought was funny, and then just did versions they hadn't seen before because none of the people playing knew me even as an acquaintance. That's kind of analogous to the Twitter and “blogger” lifestyles.
In order to sell enough ad revenue to be “good” at Twitter, you're encouraged to present a particular kind of public face. Until you either establish enough of an audience who know your personality to predict your humor in your "posts"– or you end up playing a kind of dance... more like a crowd surf of whatever is popular to do and say to your audience.
I'm thinking of two people in particular. And I'm thinking of the way artists talk about non-artists among artists and to their paying audiences. And I'm thinking of the way sports reporters interact with their audiences – because as a sports writer, your life is very different than a fiction writer, than a supernatural writer, than an historian. And it's wildly different than the audiences of painters and tarot readers.
Let me take a name to say something positive about and leave the name I see as a negative example ungiven.
Michael Silver is a person that people have opinions about. And the people who have those opinions are not the kind of people that he can tell, “Well just don't look at my work.”
If I'm watching a program and he shows up to say something I disagree with (he rarely does), and I want to tell him online that I disagree with him – regardless of the verbiage of my discourse – I have said and meant unkind things online – he has no grounds to tell me to mute him. I was watching and he just showed up in my face.
Now, I don't believe this. But people who say hateful things to people they see on TV do.
As well as people who think that because they see you on TV or hear you in a podcast or whatever will feel that they're entitled to interacting with you socially – either online or otherwise. I feel that way sometimes. I try to remind myself that people have lives, that just because mine is void of interaction from others doesn't mean that theirs isn't. But I'm also disappointed when I reach out to an author I admire and they don't like it. You know?
Anyway, Silver told a fan who was asking him inefficiently to expound on a topic that he wasn't a jukebox.
And it got me to thinking.
He's right, of course. I'm not arguing with him. I'm trying to chase this rabbit into its hole. I've got it by the foot, I just...
*ahem*
The artists whose responses to this I don't like go something more like, “Buy my work or don't and shut up either way if it isn't to praise or agree with me.”
Confirmation Bias is a wonderful drug. I have got to quit it.
The thing is, as negatively as that is framed, I don't disagree with the sentiment. When Stephen King tells you you can read his books or don't, but fuck off if you don't like his language, the themes, the graphic sexuality – I agree. Fuck off. When Maynard James Keenan says that, “If I'm the fuckin man, then you're the fuckin man as well, so you can point that fuckin finger up your ass,” I agree.
Many if not all of my heroes take this approach. You may have noticed it's the approach I've taken with this blog – and with [my football blog] https://vsrabbithole.blogspot.com
It's the exceptionalism that artists on Social Media platforms take.
What I see is weakness
The problem isn't that people don't understand or respect the life of the artist. That's soft talk. The problem is that people don't understand that nothing is ever truly for free. And that artists work is for sale and writers words are for sale and commentators opinions are for sale. We're all for sale. Haven't I been saying that since the first post? This is the economy we've created for ourselves. This is the world we've created. And we, the Consumers, don't truly appreciate our role as consumers.
Even the opinions of sports writers.
This era in history, if you don't want to hear negative criticism, you have so many powerful tools at your disposal to make sure you don't have to. But I wouldn't like demagoguery, would I? I don't like when people use the platform of their art to pretend to be something they're not.
Like moralizers and social commentarians, Messiahs and martyrs.
God, I have so much self-loathing for publishing my words.
One of the things that Rob and I have in common is that as a boy we were told that a man only has three options in this life: Either lead, follow, or get the fuck out of the way. I've spent my life trying to stay the fuck out of the way. If you've been reading these, you know that I feel compelled to lead. Both because of the unique skillset that I have as the eldest of four children from the environment in which I was raised, but also maybe because of my unique combination of distance, isolation, and moderate intelligence.
I wander so far.
If I'm going to keep up this IDGAF act, I have to connect with one of you. I have to establish pathos – or is it ethos? I don't remember. I got discouraged from learning Greek and gave it up. I do that – get discouraged and give up – too easily.
These artists see themselves as leaders. They have a cult following them, after all. And you'd pity my conviction.
So I take exception. And they block me.
Because as I've said – demagogues don't want to be seen. (I actually don't know if I've said that before. It's later in the source document this ballooned out of.) They don't want to be asked good questions.
And they absolutely do not want to be told to get off their high horses.
I have a whole theory in my head about how it's the curse of the college education that does this to people. I grew up in Industry, after all. And it is undeniable that university degrees have ruined Industry just as much as they ruined warfare during Vietnam. Dunning-Kruger, baby!
I would rarely suggest that anyone follow in my path. But the path that took me here, to questioning the world and pointing my finger... It went a little something like asking not What is wrong with the world, but with me.
I may have said this about myself – I may have said all of this – but I take advice very seriously. Everyone I listen to, read, or interact with, I'm looking for something to learn from them – either the takeaway from their mistakes, or the lessons in their wisdom. Because everyone has something to teach us. Do I need to put that on the banner for this blog? Do I know how to do that? I hope the answer is no for the former question, because it is for the latter.
I'm not patting myself on the back. I'm trying to explain how we're different.
I did not have a family and friends that I could rely on as a child. All I could do was that the word of adults and talking heads.
You have to learn your own way when you're alone and unwanted in the world.
I never went through that know-it-all phase. Everyone assumes I stopped developing at that phase – maybe I stopped developing before it. Everyone assumes I'm a well-actually guy. But, well, actually, what it is is that like a super-dimensional Intelligence, I have transcended your reality and am reaching down into it from on high to give you breadcrumbs.
Gods, I wish that didn't sound so... pretentious. And I really wish it weren't the best way I can think to describe what I'm imagining. Because I'm not exceptional. I'm not smarter than you. I don't see better. I see from a different angle. A much more distant vantage.
In a lot of ways, You are all so busy arguing over the definitions and descriptions of individual trees you can't understand that you're standing in a forest. And that you are both the tree and the observer.
I tweeted out Phil Plait's daughter, Zoe Plait's blog post yesterday. She talks in it about mindfulness and the curse thereof for her as a creative. That's what this blog is: my reconciling my decades of practice at mindfulness with what I have learned throughout.
You'll hear people, smart people, observant people, talk about how there has to be a point to everything. That you can't just “climb the mountain” – anyone else remember Rob telling the story of the Monk and the Mountain? – and get to the top and not get Answers.
Gods bless them, but if you ask the people who have ascended the Mountain, they'll tell you: there are no answers. There are no questions. There is nothing. There is no Secret.
The Secret is that there is no Secret.
I don't want to believe it, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder.
We are all a team. Humans. We're a team, whether we like it or not. We can figure that out, or things can continue to suck. That's where I'm at. And I was raised both to lead and to lead by example. So when I see fraudulent people, people who may as well be Jon Gruden for all the integrity they have behind the mask of demagoguery they wear, I cannot keep my thumbs still. This is why I balk. You do not represent me, I rage at someone who couldn't care less what I think about anything.
But where there is one, there are two. And where there are two of us, I am not alone.
And that's nice.
Wow, I really took one sentence and ran for more than 2,000 words with it.
What a pontificating blowhard I am.
Did I even say anything?
I want to end this on a positive note. I have nearly another 200 words after this, and each sentence could probably become its own PLog. So let's just start to wrap this up, and I can come back to these thoughts again later. I have other things to do and you have to be getting weary with the whiplash of my mind.
I bemoaned a week ago that my life had not been speaking to me.
That is no longer the case.
I have had many wonderful and amazing conversations with both my life and the Universe that leave me feeling like maybe I am doing something right. (re: Confirmation Bias as a Drug)
And I think I saw my Trickster the other night. I shouldn't be surprised.
This is dumb, but I think I have a Deerman or a Deer Spirit or something like attached to me. I briefly saw it outside on the patio the other night while I was in here fucking around on my bass in the dark. A shape like if a deer or an elk were to stand on its hind legs and suddenly have an incredibly beefy human torso with arms that hang around its knees – either because its hunched over or because they're that long. Both seem accurate. And naturally the head and rack of a massive and ancient stag.
I've seen it in my dreams, and it lives as a brilliant image in my mind.
So that's neat.
I haven't had so total a visual experience since I was maybe 12 or 13. Probably younger.
It probably means nothing. It probably means everything. I don't know.
What I do know is that Rob has been calling a lot lately, and it turns out he's been holding out on me for years about a lot.
Let's not even play like you care about spoilers.
After the next scene, Peitho and Rob have to escape with the Rod. That's obvious. You've read a story before. You've watched a movie.
For years, this son of a bitch has told me that all they did was fuck and wait for the day to end so they could fuck some more during the return trip back to Venice and beyond. Turns out that was not true and I will have more than just a brief, And then we escaped and then the end happened and then the finale, The End.
So thank all the gods and all their angels and all their cousins: this isn't going to end like Dan Brown's Inferno.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Okay. That wasn't exactly a positive ending, but that is the end. I'll be back with more updates on Rob and with much more vis-a-vis my obsessive thoughts. You can't wait, I'm absolutely sure.
Hope you enjoyed today's soundtrack, by the way. Metal isn't for everybody. But whatever. Like what you like. Thanks for making it this far. I'll talk at you soon.
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