Saturday 6/19/21
Heading out for exercise now. Worked several hours this AM on "Head to Give." All done with it now. One of my favorites. An absolute favorite. A strange, magical, sad, wistful, wise, funny, heartbreaking story. Sent it to The New Yorker, McSweeney's, The Atlantic, Conjunctions. Those people at those places will all do what they do because the story is by me. And also utterly unlike anything anyone else is writing or could write. Pure masterpiece, though. When did I even write that story? Yesterday? And then it's just done. Over. I'm so proud of this work. I've never written a finer anything.
I was watching an episode of Family Guy the other day. Or, rather, it was on. And Brian, the dog, was dating this woman I'd never heard of. I guess she was on this show called The Hills? Which I've also never heard of--this seems for the best, as the episode gives you a pretty good idea of what The Hills is. Anyway, this woman in real life as a reputation as an idiot. The actress. Brian likes her because she's hot, but then he learns she has this whole secret existence. She's a genius doing these experiments in molecular biology and reading Plato and discussing the works of Manet. And Brian is like, "Whoa, the fuck, you're smart, why have you kept this a secret?" She says that she has to in order to be successful. That Americans hate intelligence and intelligent people. This is the entire premise of an episode of freaking Family Guy from like ten years ago. The relationship doesn't work out because Brian feels so threatened by this woman that he realizes is exponentially smarter than he is. No one wants that, is the lesson. And Americans hate brilliance, and if you want to be successful, you better not be brilliant.
This is what I battle every day, but it was upsetting to see what I know even in cartoon form.
Nothing matters more to an unhealthy, insecure, angry person than what they can tell themselves. Nothing matters more to a healthy, confident, stable person than what is true.
There are more unhealthy, insecure, angry people than there has ever before been. They represent 999,999 parts out of one million. Their ways have been transmuted into what is now the status quo, and the status of expectations. To not meet these expectations and stand outside of the status quo is to be the enemy. A threat. A source of fear. The less a person meets these expectations and the more they stand in contrast to them, the more they will be hated, feared, envied, shunned. Denied. Ignored. Walked away from.
So what do you do?
That is always the billion dollar question here. I say billion dollar, because I could make a billion dollars. If this were a meritocracy. Or I could tilt it into enough of one.
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