Yeah, It’s A Rant, I Guess

[I must say this: don’t be put off by anything you find here. If you’re reading this, I’m probably not talking to you.

Ha, shows that I’m still afraid to really go off on a rant. Wouldn’t want to offend anyone.]

I was cleaning out my inbox this morning and came across some comments for this blog, which guilted me into starting a post. Well, that’s harsh. I always want to post but I don’t want to write something of mediocre quality that I’ll later regret. (In truth, the reason is probably more that I’m lazy, but we’ll go with the first for now.)

But here I am now, aware that, though few they may be, I actually do have a few readers and I should keep them coming back at least occasionally by making some additions from time to time. When I look at other blogs I usually see very short entries, maybe even just three lines. Especially celebrity blogs. Celebrities are so lazy. Why would they not put valuable time into communicating with (sorry, to) their ever-doting fans? Isn’t that a priority to them? Ha. If I were famous I’d write less too. Because obviously they don’t need Internet fans. I, on the other hand, seem to be doing this as a thinly veiled plea for kindred spirits. And I’m long-winded. Seems when I open up that certain valve, it takes a lot of force to get it shut again.

I’m going to do something new here: post poetry. Well, it rhymes, at least; I don’t know if I dare be so bold as to call it poetry. I’ve put some poems on Facebook before, but honestly, I’m not sure why I bother. I usually hate other people’s poems on Facebook. For some reason I consider my own different. And if people out there hate them, they keep their mouths shut, because it’s not polite to criticize someone’s creativity. Bah. Send it through the fire if you want anything of worth. Believe it or not, I don’t put things on Facebook to attract attention. Well, maybe I enjoy the attention when it comes. But my main sentiment is not, “Look at me, look at me.” If it were, I’d lip-sync pop songs on YouTube. Or something. No, my main feeling behind any publishings is, “Hey, I wrote this, what do you think?” But people seldom say what they think – they compliment, yes, and maybe it’s genuine, but that’s a very superficial reaction. I really want a deeper reaction – “What do you think? Are you changed by this?” Perhaps I’m being presumptuous, but ultimately I want my writing to change things (by things I mean people), and not just on an emotional level. I didn’t write a letter to my deceased grandfather because I was overcome with emotion, and I didn’t put it on Facebook so others could feel similarly! Don’t cry, change! Value the relationships you have that could be gone tomorrow.

But people cry and compliment and forget. However, that is the way of humans. It just means I need to practice to become a better writer, a deeper writer, a more…permanent writer. Sorry about that long paragraph, and sorry that it started sounding like a rant. One of these days I may forgive myself a real long, explosive rant (and it probably will never see the light of day) but for now I’m content to suppress them. They’re cheap and low-class, after all.

[Haha, I wrote that paragraph thinking that the next section would be fairly short. That was before I decided to let loose…]

However, I’ll push the line here once again. Because there’s one more thing I want to address that bothers me.

The ‘Like’ button.

(And before I launch in again, I suppose I should disclaim that I’m not against compliments per se. Thank you to all who’ve commented on anything that I’ve written anywhere, I really do appreciate it, and thank you especially for all the condolences. In fact, now that I slow down a bit, I realize that I should be careful what I say, because it could be misunderstood. Hmm. Okay. Let’s do it this way. I’m not talking to any of you guys. You all rock, except for the anonymous person who said, “This is fake.” To you, dear sir, I don’t quite understand what you mean, but I’m guessing you won’t be elaborating. To the rest of you, I appreciate you very much. When I complain, I’m talking more to the Facebook crowd, and not even to most of them, because they’re good people – I’m really just talking to a few select people. You know, the ones who say things like, “OMG this is SOO sad!!! it made me cry SOOO much!!!!!” That’s who I’m complaining about. The rest of you can rest easy. Whew. That was a long disclaimer.)

The ‘Like’ button. It’s appearing everywhere. First Facebook (at least, that’s where I first saw it), then YouTube, now here! And since Facebook is connected to everything, I see that button on every site that has a link to Facebook.

The ‘Like’ button. Could anything be more lazy, apathetic, cheap, or infuriating? (Yes, I know, many things, but that was hyperbole.) Not only are people too lazy to form opinions consisting of more than one word, they’re too lazy to even type one word! This button is barely more than a stamp of ‘noted’. What they’re saying, whether they mean to or not, is: “I read this, or at least enough to think that I got the gist of it, I felt slightly favorable towards the content, and then I moved on and forgot about it.” Blurghkslvwfla! Don’t even indicate your passing if that’s all the response you can muster.

Of course it doesn’t help that every time I see that someone ‘liked’ something I imagine their attitude to be like that of the overly cheerful intern on Scrubs (season 8). “Oh, that’s great, that’s wonderful! I only read the first line but I’m so happy for you! Bunnies!” Would I regret punching you in the face? No, it’d be worth it.

Yes, winding down. This is another case of me being prejudiced and extremely favoritistic. I organize, usually without even thinking about it, my friends and acquaintances into groups. If you’re in the right group, you could do something as dastardly as click the ‘Like’ button on something of mine and I’d be sort of okay with it. We’d still be cool. On the other hand, if you’re in the wrong group, you could ‘like’ my status once and forever after be that person in the front of my mind as I pound out these pseudo-rants with revulsion. Don’t do that to yourself. Keep your fingers away from the button. Write something – something good. If you’re not sure about your standing in my groupings, put your comment in a message. I don’t want weird stuff in front of all my other friends. Now I’m just being mean. But yes, I do delete comments.

(I rarely disclose these group listings, but if you really want to know, I guess you could try asking. Most people in the right group know that they are, and the people in the wrong group don’t know. Haha. If I say, “Don’t worry,” then you’re good, if I say “Hey, I don’t share that information,” then you might want to worry. Do other people classify like this? I know I’m awful, but am I alone in my awfulness?)

This joke has been said a thousand times, but perhaps I can redeem myself somewhat by saying I don’t mean this as a joke, I’m completely serious: if you’re going to have a ‘Like’ button, at least give us people over here a ‘Dislike’ button to even things out. And while you’re at it, taking requests, I’d like a ‘Tool’ button, too. Countless are the times I could’ve used that one, especially to…well, er…should I say this? I guess I’ll go ahead and say it. It would be really useful for when I’m looking at the profiles of the other guy friends (the ones I haven’t met) of my female friends. Ahahahahaha. Oh man. Can I ever come back from that one? Let’s take a break.

[Please understand that I’m doing this as a favor to you guys. By baring my innards and being really honest about the way my thoughts and feelings work, I’m hoping you can learn from it somehow and be wiser in your dealings with others. I want to do everything I can to help you as you take on the world. So I’m like a case study. But perhaps a bad one, if other people don’t actually think like me.]

Okay, back. Let’s get this done with. ‘Downright Idiot’ would be another useful one. Imagine that showing up in your inbox: ‘Congratulations! Brad ___ thinks you’re a Downright Idiot. Best wishes from the Facebook Team.’

And since we’re now able to cast our indifferent approval upon any bit of content on the web, why not just apply these buttons to people themselves. Make it so we can ‘like’, ‘dislike’, ‘tool’, or ‘downright idiot’ people’s profiles. Ooo! Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could vote people off Facebook? ‘We’re sorry, but 500 of your so-called friends think you’re a Tool. If you are unable to collect 250 Likes within 24 hours, your account will be terminated. Best wishes from the Facebook Team.’ And then we’d have people running around saying things like, “Can you Like me? Please Like me! What can I do to get you to Like me?” And girls at their sleepovers: “So does he, like, Like you, or, like, like like you?” “Oh, he just Likes you. He doesn’t really like you.” What will become of our species!?

Guess I wasn’t really winding down before. But I am now.

All this to say that I think it’s interesting how as we become able to give our opinions on more and more things, we communicate less and less. We’re clicking buttons, saying more, saying less, losing our expressive ability.

So don’t ‘Like’ my stuff. Tell me what you like. Tell me what you hate. And why. Write something.

I know I should polish this and make it less rant-like, because yes, that’s what it is, no matter how much I try to deny it, but I created this, ugh, ‘blog’ so that I would be able to share without too much editing. I’d complain about this on Facebook, where people might actually see it, but it just seems like it would be disregarded. Why bother? And it certainly wouldn’t be as juicy. Plus, I don’t want to make it seem like I’m attacking every single person who’s ever ‘liked’ anything on my profile. I’m really just attacking those in the second group I talked about before.

Anyways, I promised something that rhymed, so here it is. I’ll give you the first, well, second, draft, and then the revised edition, because you get cool freebies like that when you visit my blog. Facebook will only get the final (for now) product.

Draft:

When spring is skipped

To get to summer,

The fall comes quick,

And that’s a bummer.

I laughed at that. But of course it’s unacceptable. So I thought a bit and came up with this:

When spring is skipped

To get to summer,

The fall comes quick –

Cold winter’s forerunner.

I kind of like that. Maybe someday I’ll be able to add some more stanzas to it.

Whaddaya know, this got long.

Thanks for reading, I’m going to take one more quick look through this to make sure there’s not anything I really couldn’t stand to have you see, then I’ll put it up. And hopefully the next one won’t be too long coming!

Bye

-Brad

Welcome, and is there any way around what this is?

It’s typically only in hindsight that we recognise life-changing events, like making a friend, reading a book, hearing a question, scraping rock bottom for the thousandth time, still remembering bedside resolve upon waking the next morning…

or opening a door when you thought you were only curious to see what lay on the other side.

[Do you read italics differently than regular font? I do.]

 

I…did it. I made a blog. After all I said about how much I hate that word. How I hate what it brings to mind.

Not that I really hate the concept. I actually like the concept. People all over the world sharing their minds for anyone else to partake of and connect through mutual interest. But…I don’t immediately think of that when I hear the word “blog”. Yes, I just put those quotation marks before the comma. That’s where they belong, at least in my world, and this page is a tiny piece of that convoluted expanse thrust into this ‘real’ one. At least it will be. I suppose at this point it just looks like another default WordPress discharge (I wonder how many blogs never leave that stage?). But that will change. I will explore all those possibilities at a later date.

I might as well say it now. I have no intention of following linear thought processes on this, well, I’ll just grit my teeth and say it, blog. My essays and other forms of prose are for linear, proper discourses. This, as the title hopefully suggests, is the other six days of the week (or, unfortunately, the other thirty days of the month). This is the tangled swamp of thoughts that may possibly aspire to someday achieve ‘prose’ status but at this time are not blessed with the effort on my part. Or the near-worthless thoughts that almost (and probably exactly) no one cares about. The things I want to say, and want to say quickly, without a lot of thought, editing, censorship, or even complete sentences. I will at least use proper grammar and punctuation, except where I deem it appropriate not to or as in the case above where I believe I have valid reason to supersede traditional forms or merely commit a grievous oversight. I apologize in advance (or perhaps I’ve already done it?) for the last.

These entries will not be linear, except by odd chance, perhaps; they will abound with parentheses (such a lovely word to say out loud, do try it), run off on countless rabbit trails in whichever way my mind does please, and they may even contain the same adjective more than once in the same paragraph – although for that, I do hope not.

The reason for this is not only to satisfy my whimsical literary node. I also want to document those alternative intellectual forays which ultimately get cut from the final product or are discounted before they ever take shape. I don’t want to lose ideas that do have a place somewhere, just not in the piece I’m at that time constructing. So they will be granted life here, at my…on my…blog.

The beauty of writing – ah, there I’ve done it, I’ve gone and used a phrase with immeasurable power as an introductory statement to a body with nowhere near the capacity to fulfill it. Whether it’s a sentence, paragraph, essay, chapter, book, or anthological collection of literary works, anything that begins with “The beauty of writing…” should be a revelation that changes your life, don’t you think? The beauty of that discourse itself should be outstanding, and its message, well, breathtaking. I cannot by any means live up to that yet. So let’s try this again:

The neat thing about writing (oh, the soothing relief of minimal expectations) is that once I’ve exhausted a particular rabbit trail, I can simply scroll up to where I last diverged and continue from that point. If this were a conversation that would be impossible, not that you’d ever let me ramble this long, I hope. See, I’ve all but forgotten where I started this entry or what I meant to accomplish by it. But never fear, poor, pathetic memory, digital storage has your back! I’ll just glance back to see that…

That “glance back” took longer than expected. Turns out that the points at which I left the main trail are not, after all, that easy to recognize. That, quite simply, is because the main trail does not exist. I haven’t written this yet. So wherever I seem to diverge is actually not much of a change at all, for I was bushwhacking before, and I am still bushwhacking on a slightly different topic. Oh, the complexities of writing. That’s one of the things I intend to explore to some depth through this venture (making a blog). And there, I just remembered what I was going to say in the first paragraph. But before I go back to that (or would it be going ahead?) let me just grant closure (closure? You said you’d be non-linear and careless! Ah, but I am Type A, after all, I can’t get away with too much brute force bulldozing ahead. I have to spend a bit of time straightening the carnage behind me) here by explaining that the complexity I intend to explore mentioned above is that of multiple ideas flitting around in my head, of which I can only choose one at a time to pursue. So what happens to those other ideas? Like I said before, the more obvious ones I can scroll up, bring back to mind, and continue with, but the more fleeting ones (the majority of them) I may never see again. It pushes me to reflect on our paths in life and the choices we make. We can never really know what would’ve happened had we done something differently, we can only make our choices and stand by them – pushing through what cannot be helped and learning from mistakes. This, like so many other references in this supposedly introductory blog post, is a topic for another time.

Alright. That was a thought worth finishing, right? I thought so. Most of them aren’t, I know.

So what I was going to say is that the whole global community thing isn’t what I think of when I first hear the word “blog”. The first thing I think of, honestly, is a log of bla. Like a log floating in a toilet. It’s in a toilet because it’s made of bla – mundane words expressing uninteresting ideas that have been said before and are only being said again because of antagonized emotions and lack of self-control and focus. Do you know what I mean? People who have nothing of value to share nevertheless spewing their boring and at the same time frighteningly misinformed prejudices at so often tragically like-minded audiences who cry, “Hell yeah!” and take to the streets in angsty uproar.

Hyperbole? Perhaps. My guess is you either knew what I meant from the start or are one of…them.

Let me also just say that I love the font this editing field displays text in. If you object to my ending that sentence with a preposition, I could always say, “I love the font this field uses to display text.” See there, the quotation marks are outside of the period because they contain a full sentence. When they don’t contain a full sentence, I put the period on the outside. Logical, no? Are we blindly following rules and social norms regardless of their practicality or ultimate consequence? Let me insert at this point that there is absolutely no such word as “irregardless”.

And I was wrong to begin the last paragraph with a “just [verb]” phrase. Or is it a clause? You’ve got me there. Because I most certainly did not ‘just’ say that. I did not ‘merely’ say that. I said much more than that short sentence. I rarely ‘just’ say anything. I’m rather verbose…yes, yes, I know you can hardly believe it, but it’s quite true. It’s probably a weakness, a weakness I’m only feeding by indulging in on this site. Oh well.

The whole “just” issue could easily lead me into a rant about one of my worst pet peeves. But I won’t go there at this time. I won’t even launch into a monologue on the word “rant” at this time (Oh, I will eventually). But it’s getting late, that’s why I forgive myself for beginning two sentences in the same paragraph with the same word, and why I must stop writing now. It seems my writing takes on the most fervour (British spelling, you dumb WordPress spellcheck…you’re so dumb you even call your own name a mistake. There, there, I was only being expressive. You’re not really dumb. Just a bit sporadic – that’s nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you learn from it. Wait. This whole parenthetical aside is useless, because I just realized that it’s not a WordPress spellcheck, it’s my Mac’s spellcheck! Let’s just forget that bit of rambling ever happened. Please.) late at night, which is good for creative juices but bad for my health. Hopefully with this neat-o blog (I’m conditioning myself to saying it) I’ll begin writing at more decent hours. On my nice black Macbook. Are you a Mac? I’m a Mac, converted a few years ago, actually.

Okay, quick sum up for my A-ness (say that out loud – you’ll wonder why I ever let that sentence pass into the public domain). I made a blog but still don’t feel comfortable calling it that. I’m not sure I like my URL – I’ll probably think of something far better as soon as I roll over to go to sleep tonight. At least I can change the name of my page at any time. I could be doing this in list form but I won’t break up the nice paragraph thang (purposeful misspelling, killed by the fact that I felt I had to explain it) going on. You may not like my grammatical freelancing or my stream-of-consciousness style, but if you do I’d like you to introduce yourself. We may be kindred spirits. I like to write about writing. I’m embarking on this journey because I need to write a lot (for self-improvement and creative production) but thus far have been too much of a perfectionist to publish a piece without much time devoted to crafting and editing, resulting in me often not even making the effort (criminal, I know). And finally, I must sleep.

Remind me at some later date to talk about journaling. And whatever else you think I may have missed or you suspect I could be tricked into expositing (that word wasn’t in my widget dictionary but it seems to exist and mean what I intend) upon.

Though I may not sound like it, I am so glad you read this far (or even skipped down to see the end, although that’s rather lame). I could never write this if I knew there was no potential for it to be read, but even if it is never read by anyone other than the future me, it was made possible by that potential. If you feel me on that one, pound it in a comment.

Okay, thank you, welcome, g’night.

-Brad