Wednesday 10/13/21
Some mid-week thoughts. Yo.
There are two keys to being consistently "laid back." One of them is not caring about anything. If you don't care about anything, then what's it to you? Not caring about anything is a matter of an absence of intellectual curiosity. But it's more than that. An absence of emotional curiosity, for instance. To not care about anything, one must also not make a priority of discerning right from wrong, so within this same key to being consistently laid back is a lack of moral awareness. The second key is not knowing anything. If you don't know anything, and people say whatever, again I say, "What's it to you?" It can mean anything to you. You don't know. If I walk into a village where people are speaking a language I don't know, and someone walks over to me and says something in their native tongue, it can be anything; a well wish for my day, or a curse to damn my soul; and I'll smile and nod. I don't know. I don't know at all. I would appear quite laid back. So, to me, if one boasts about being laid back, they are boasting that there is nothing they care about, and nothing they know about. To which again I say, "You go get 'em, superstar."
That aforementioned walk won't be happening. There's nothing here for me. This is the person who asked me how many Beatles concerts I've gone to, which would make me sixty-five. This is me. And yes, I know the mirror needs a wipe down. It's not my mirror. Best case scenario, that's soap.
Also had never heard of Rip Van Winkle, and despite receiving a copy of my book (and had also never heard of Sam Cooke) and texting with me, still can't spell my name correctly. This is just the world now. There's nothing out there, people-wise.
There's no substance, intelligence, education, normalcy, and also sanity. Those five things just don't exist in anyone. They're not out there, that person is not out there. Or they're hardly out there. Let alone a person of true greatness.
I was trying to explain how the world is to someone the other day. They're at some remove from people. They have their job, their immediate family, and me. And nothing else, really. This is a smart person. We go way back. So we were talking about Twitter, and I was telling them about the show The Mandalorian, how it's this Star Wars spinoff on the Disney app. And the race of the Mandalorians themselves have this saying they use. Now, this is fucking stupid. It's cliched, lazy, but it's the kind of thing that dumb people think is really deep. It's such a scam of shitty ass writing, but whatever. That's how it works. And the thing the members of this race say to each other is, "This is the way."
Many people obviously know this. They've seen the show. But I'm describing the example I used with this guy. People go on Twitter, and they respond to whatever someone else has posted--some fucking idiocy--by saying "This is the way." 43,230 of them will do that. The exact same comment, from the exact same show. They're all referencing the same thing. They're all too stupid to think of their own words. And each time one of these idiots says this comment, sixteen of their fellow idiots will hit the like button. For the fucking comment they just saw from 5000 other fucking idiots.
But if you wrote something intelligent, insightful, fresh, witty, entertaining, no one is going to hit the like button for your comment. Because no one wants that. People don't want intelligence. They want chatty Kathy and a fart joke. You know what's funny, too? Sometimes I'll put up a few paragraphs from a masterful short story I wrote on my Facebook author page that use first person or about something in life that I know that no one else does, put a way that no one else could put it. There was something recently I did this with about trust from "Upon Becoming a Ghost," which is as fine a thing as a human being has done in this world.
And people will hit the like button--and they're only hitting the like button--because they've mistaken the paragraphs as having come from this blog. Again, it's that idea of access that we've spoken about, and chatty fucking Kathy. People think I'm more real than a character, which is a dumb way of thinking. And besides, people lie to you all fucking day. But if I gave that same fucking person that story, they wouldn't like it, or they wouldn't say jack shit about it to me, or they'd stare the masterpiece straight in the face and offer up some half-assed passive aggressive gruel-thin compliment, because to them, it's starting off from this different place of smart person stuff, and not chatty fucking Kathy, aka, hey, it's Colin going on about something in some gossip-y kind of way that's easy to read.
When it's the same fucking thing, but it is viewed as coming with a different label. It's like someone used to say to me: "People will all love different things you do, but different people will have different favorites." Which is total fucking bullshit, because it's all the same, really, whether it's "Fitty" or a Beatles piece or the Scrooge book or Buried or an entry here or an op-ed. I am infinitely complicated and chambered as an artist, and there is no artist like me that way. But even still, I do one fucking thing an infinite number of ways: I tell stories. But someone will get obsessed with this fucking journal, and not check out anything else. Which is beyond fucking stupid. And it's not even really what I fucking do, just throwing shit up on here. It's not even close to what I really fucking do and do better than anyone else who has ever lived and will ever live and which is also better than anyone has ever ever done anything else or will. But they view it as coming in a box labeled chatty fucking Kathy. And then they think that it's "real," because it's me, this person.
Who's to fucking say I'm not making all of this shit up and it's all part of some giant fucking 86-volume novel called Many Moments More? What's the fucking difference? Because someone thinks they have access to me? They don't. There's this communication pipeline between us? There isn't. But I'll tell you, that section in "Devil Lines," when the fucking devil knocks on the dude's door--that section sets up a pipeline between you and the very fucking mysteries and meanings of life. The beyond. And also everything in your fucking world. But this is fucking lesser, it's not first fucking hand from the fucking pump, because these people aren't "real"? It's not fucking gossip and memoir? How the fuck are they not real? You will never have a more real experience in your life than with something like that. I wrote that, and I actually applauded the fucking screen. It was a holy fucking experience, reading that back, and I don't mean any religious shit. That was it, man. That was fucking everything. That was the answer, that was the fucking light. And I experienced it as if it were something that wasn't even by me. It fucking transcended "Um, yeah, I did that." But this here is real just because I'm typing it and I say fucking "I" and "me"? That's inane. But yeah--if I labeled those three paragraphs on my FB author page as coming from a story, no one would hit that fucking like button. But I just put them up there unattributed, and idiots make their idiotic conclusions, and say, "oh, I really like that." And then I have to go through the motions of being nice to these people, but that's a different talk for a different day.
Get it? That's it. That one example with the whole "this is the way" thing tells you everything, in a way, you need to know about society and how the world works now. Everything is a version of that "This is the way" comment. Every form of success. That's how it happens, by doing a version of that line. Whether it's with the shitty, totally fucking rote book you did that gets awards, or whatever the fuck it is. Success is predicated on some version of that kind of behavior, imbecility, lack of originality, cliche, repetition, parroting. Anything breaking with that, with being like that, fails. You're utterly fucking fucked.
This guy got it exactly. "People want the common ground." That's what it is. The shallowest common ground there is. It's from there that everything is then given to you. Whether you're Skip Bayless, Roxane Gay, or someone less intelligent than a blob of mucus with 1.7 million Twitter followers. That's what Barstool is. That's what everything is. There is no success in this world right now that's not a version of this. Save in sports. But everything else is this.