Most people

Tuesday 7/14/26

Most people go their entire lives without saying a single witty or funny thing. Wit is beyond their mental and creative capabilities (wit also requires wisdom as to who and how we are), and if the humor happens, it will be by accident and not design, with the laugh being on them.

Nor is humor subjective. Nothing is subjective. There's what we're able to discern because of our abilities and what we're not able to because of our shortcomings. But every thing is that which it is. Before we show up or regardless of if we do.

But you take something idiotic, loutish, lowest common denominator, coming from some mouth breathing Barstool-type, and everyone in the proverbial room laughs, that doesn't mean it's funny or witty. It's about those people and what they are and aren't. Now, of course those same types of people are going to turn around and say, "It's all subjective," because that covers for their lack of intelligence and discernment. That's the purpose of that line.

Preference is different. Rare is the person who understands the difference between preference and assessment.

It's true that it's never too late to start anything, but it can also depend on how you look at that and your views on what starting means and its importance. A start can involve an ending. A start can be about spirit. Or morality. The choice to be a certain way that is right and, if not best, better. It can be worthwhile to start something in the last week of your life. Make it count.

Books that use someone else's title for their title annoy me. I take it as the author's way of telling me that they aren't creative, they don't insist on newness, they lack imagination, vision, and the respect for themselves that an author who is worth my time and energy deserves. There can be exceptions, but they're rare, and other factors are involved far beyond, "Oh, this will do" and "Right, I'll just use this."

People will tell you that someone is their favorite something, or something if their favorite something, and they won't even know how to spell the name of that someone or something. It's because they're not a serious person and they're just saying something. Nothing they could ever say is worth paying attention to. They're not an individual of sincerity. They're a non-person of saying things. Very different.

There's enough noise in the world. Don't add to it. Noise takes all forms. Saying something for attention. Which is different than asking for help, mind you. If you need help, signify and/or say that you need it. Noise is laying on the horn. Asking for a link when you could take two seconds and type whatever it is in a search engine yourself. Noise is trolling.

Be within yourself. Stay within yourself as you go out and about in the world. Only say and write that which adds. If there isn't a benefit to it, don't do it, don't say it, don't write it. There is so much noise as there is. Babble, babble, babble.

Deploying "u" for "you" and "ur" for "your" and the like only signify that you are detritus. That you don't have respect for yourself and that no intelligent person should have respect for you. Similarly, all gifs and memes and the likes are the tools of the small-brained. They only reveal you to be intellectually infantile. When you don't have your own stuff, you aren't even really you, save in name only. And lots of people almost certainly have your name. That's going to be good enough for you? Where's your self-respect? If you aren't you, and that includes in what you say, you aren't really anything.

Your people are those who are similar, but you'll go nowhere with them, the same as no one will go anywhere significant with you. And not mastering things like "then" and "than" and how "a" and "an" work and how to pluralize nouns is at a similar level to not having mastered how to wipe your ass. When I see that with people, I assume they can't successfully do the latter either. I look at them in the instances that I know are not the result of a typo as if they have "Poor Anal Hygiene" stamped across their forehead, scarlet letter style, and that, I'm pretty sure, is not what Hawthorne was going for, but I can't un-read/see those glowing words all the same.

While we're at it: "The Thompsons are coming over for dinner tomorrow." See how easy that was? You just add an "s" to the last name in order to pluralize it unless it ends in s, x, z, ch, or sh. Then you add "es." That's it. There's nothing else to this. Like magic, right? No apostrophes. You will look like less of a bum, mentally speaking, to people who are also not bums mentally speaking, if you are able to perform this magic trick yourself. You know, the 425 of them that remain. The goal is to boost that number, though. Unfortunately, it's not England in the time of the Napoleonic Wars and we can't send the press gang out to round up crew members in this regard for our great big sailing vessel of life. We have to ask. Or present a case--to those who won't and can't read it--why this would be better for all and have the people to whom the case is presented say, "Hmmm, makes sense" and actually do something about it.

Excuses, by the way, will take everything from you. Everything you can be, everything you can offer. They will rip your life clear away from you. They'll take your time, your energy, your heart, your soul, your brain. Excuses will strip you for parts that can't even be used anywhere or by anyone else. Falling back on them time and again is like falling repeatedly on a sword, somehow returning to technically-alive-life (up you pop), just so you can fall on it again.

Excuses make it impossible for us to recognize ourselves as we once thought of ourselves or as that person we envisioned ourselves becoming. They also have the effect of blinding us to our own role in our own destruction. Faux-logic feeds excuses, anger feeds excuses. We are apt to have people in our lives who are there in large part to help us justify our excuses. The only good excuse is a vanquished excuse. A dead excuse. An excuse you left lifeless on the floor and stepped around. That may not solve your problems. But it will give you back to you. And if you don't have you, you may well have the biggest of all problems. So, in that sense, there's one problem solved. But it's likely to hurt at first and conceivably for a while, and you must be strong and brave.

Most humans are born with the same level of mental abilities. The same as raccoons, slugs, dolphins. There isn't a raccoon in the neighborhood who has been at it for years but just wasn't born with the brains to figure out how to get the lid off of a single trash can, and the other raccoons are like, "That's Clem, stupid as the crayfish are tasty."

What people wrongly think is intelligence is actually someone deciding to try harder, save in exceedingly/historically rare cases (Orson Welles, Delacroix). To think more. To learn more. To look things up. Read some books along the way. Expand their horizons some. Put the screen down and have some brain time. To make a good faith effort. So, if someone read this or anything in here and thought, "Fuck him! He thinks I'm dumb!" the truth is that, well, that might be true and a significant understatement, but that same person could also become un-dumb and one of the smarter ones. You can keep adding on, as well.

Granted, it could be too late for them, but intelligence in our world is mostly a choice. If you choose not to make that choice, you are a selfish person who makes the world worse for me, society, your friends (who probably aren't really your friends because friendship doesn't much exist anymore save in hollow name only given how everyone is), your family, and--this is the one you'd think would get people to get their act together, given their narcissism--yourself.

But, some intelligence is required to connect those dots, which is to say, you have to make the effort of thinking.

That thing where someone makes a bad joke online--which you may think was a smashing effort if you lack discernment as we've been talking about it--and you make yours in following is something you should avoid doing. It does nothing. No one thinks you're a great wit. You added nothing. You simply indulged yourself by adding noise to noise.

Fifty such comments will follow, one after another. All these people...the same. If someone could read your words back to you and you'd be embarrassed over how immature and unintelligent you come across, then be someone who doesn't do that. Have something more substantive to say that adds to the lives of others. Everything you do, say, write, should add positive value to the world. Don't feed a cacophony. Why get angry, when you can get smarter?