The other day I was looking through other online journals, trying to find a design I liked and could steal, and I ran across a blog called Food Journal. A post for Food Journal looks something like this-
7/01
Today for breakfast I had a bagel with cream cheese and a glass of apple juice. At lunch I had a turkey sandwich on rye bread with mayo and swiss cheese, chips, and a coke. In the afternoon I drank two Saranac pale ales. For dinner I had macaroni and cheese, and two more Saranac pale ales. Man, look at all those carbs!
Aside from having an alcohol problem, this person is really boring. "Man," I thought on first reading it, "Thank God I'm not like that! Haha."
But then I thought, "What if I am boring? What if I think I'm really clever and entertaining, but I'm really as boring as this joker, and the main difference between us is that I don't know it? I mean at least this guy doesn't aspire to entertain and fail, right? Jesus, I need to aim lower!"
So I have decided to change my blog- from now on I will be boring on purpose. This blog will hereafter be a journal about Madden Football, and my efforts to take the Indianapolis Colts to the top. Here's a peek at what a post in Madden Journal will look like:
7/01
Today, when I used the "Ask Madden for a play call" feature, John Madden incited me to "Show the defense what a finely tuned machine [I am]." This seemed vaguely homoerotic to me, but I refused to let mild homophobia get the upper hand, and I won a great victory over the Minnesota Vikings, 31-6.
Speaking of John Madden-
Here's something I saved from McSweeney's last year about John Madden. I hope that you like it; I like to think if I really made my blog exclusively about football it might be half this funny:
Madden has officially lost it. Someone once patted him on the back about that six-legged turkey thing, and in the process created a monster. Like we're dying to hear a guy in his sixties pine over a lineman's belly for 24 minutes. Then out comes the electric crayon. Do
you think we'll hear these words come out of Madden's mouth by the end of the season?
That was a nice play. Ever make love to a cactus? Yeah, a cactus. You know, you're in the desert. It's lonesome. It's dark. You haven't had a decent piece of ass in weeks. You happen upon one, and heck, it's standing straight up, kinda like a person. Even has those things hangin' off, I'll call 'em arms. . . and you've been out there for so long, and you've got a firm erection, so you shower the cactus with compliments, then you set about the business of making love to it. I guess if there was a record player, there might be a little Paul Anka playing, and you dab on a little cologne. You just size up the cactus, and heck there may already be a hole somewhere on the thing, and you just gotta brush the prickles aside and get your hips up next to it and start rocking into it. I mean really kissing it, and pretty soon your schwantz is hangin' out and maybe former Steelers great Rocky Bleier drives by in an old rag-top Caddy, and he kinda slows down 'cause of the flare you fired off three hours ago when you got a flat, and at this point you don't even wanna be saved because you're really pluggin' away on the cactus. My only question is where do you deliver your load? You know? The climax? 'Cause you can't get the thing pregnant, there's no danger of that, although I'd really like to see a family of half people, half cacti running around, celebrating the holidays, but anyway, do you just let it run down the side of the thing and hope it either dries or provides some protein for a couple of buzzards or do you shoot it right into the cactus? My vote is for inside the damn thing. Heck, no fuss no muss.
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4 comments:
Andrew and readers, google "the dullest blog in the world" for dullness in blogging par excellence. Also, know that for a very brief moment on my friendster profile I had a thing about making love to cactuses. I sort of have a thing for cactuses, particularly sanguaros, which are the ones with the arms. Did you know those are only found in and around Tucson? In the Sonora desert.
One thing that specialized your entry within the 'enjoy my dull blog' genre was self deprecation. Your reference to the dullness was quite explicit, and was paired with an entry that not only was of lukewarm interest, but was mostly taken from another source. On the other hand, the 'dullest blogger'(see above) was oblique about dullness; his explicit reference to dullness is limited to the title and to certain syntactic and content markers recurring in the text of the entries (which may mark out a boundary and a common ground between the dull and the funny). Such a limited and unintimidating dose of dullness is easily neutralized by the self-evident enjoyment that the refined reader achieves through interaction with the 'dullest blog'. Each element of dullness is neatly subverted to the cause of interest through humorous mechanisms of irony (in the case of the title) and parody (in the case of the subject matter and the rigourous construction). It's a neat reaction; the parody makes it funny, which in turn creates the irony by rendering it not-dull.
In your entry, however, dullness is exhibited and described without any sense of shame. It is paraded about as if it were a piece of meat, and a piece of cooked meat at that, when in fact it is raw and dripping with the author's own blood. The meat exhibited here is both proud and ashamed of it's rawness - proud de facto, because it publishes itself. ashamed by writ, because the author 'needs to aim lower'. proud again, because of the transgression of writing shame. What else accounts for the drive needed to actually put the shame into writing?
The transgression, that is, of displaying bloody meat. No-one nowadays suggests that anyone eat meat that is running with blood. In fact, raw meat is rarely presented except for as part of the process by which an animal becomes (cooked) food. One man's meat, in particular, is another man's taboo. But here it seems the author would make cannibals of us, asking us to eat his shame, which is distasteful to us. In fact, the negative irony that cuts back at it's subject is to us an abomination. Let us be perfectly clear: it does not please us well. One man's meat is another man's taboo, but here the author presents his unmentionable parts as if they were a feast! Take shame where the shameful belongs! Out of site! Or else one thinks it not shameful, proclaim it openly, without calling it something else (that is, shameful)! One cannot move mountains by reinforcing their foundations! Give unto shame what is due shame, and unto Caeser what it Caeser's! Do not give unto Caeser what is due shame, and say "look Caeser, it is shameful!" and then grin like a donkey! For Caeser will smote you, and the children of Jews and gentiles will spit on your name!
I wanted to respond to this particular comment for several reasons. First, it’s somewhat clever and entertaining, and while I can’t know how long it’s composition took the author, writing such a comment would take me a fair amount of time.
Second, I am dying to know who wrote it.
It has occurred to me that it might be from the author of Food Journal. If that is the case, I’d like to take the opportunity to apologize to the author of Food Journal, for calling him boring, and a joker, and for saying that he has an alcohol problem. Those were cruel things to say, particularly since they were said in an attempt to make other people laugh.
That aside, I wish the author had identified himself, if only for the sake of basic courtesy.
Finally, I would like to respond to the criticism made. Maybe I misunderstand (While the comment under discussion is certainly entertaining, it is by no means clear, and in all the discussion of meat and blood it’s easy to lose hold of the author’s point), but it seems that the chief criticism of the commentator, whoever he may be, is this: I am boring, I am aware of it, and I present my self-awareness to the reader expecting him to be amused by my honesty.
I disagree. What the commentator took for self-deprecation would more accurately be described as self-doubt. I don’t think of myself as boring, but I do experience doubts-- that I am arrogant and mean, that I spend too much time thinking about my blog, that future posts will be of a poorer quality than past ones. This post mentioned my doubts for the purpose of
1. Making amends for picking on someone else by implying that I could be guilty of the same crime,
2. Trying to show that I am not an egotistical jackass, and
3. Accurately expressing who I am. I am a person who is low on self-confidence, and many parts of my blog are an expression of that, whether it is attractive or not.
That the commentator doesn’t like my blog is fine; that he took the time to write a long comment detailing his distain for what I have written is hurtful. If you don’t like my blog then I invite you not to read it. I would also offer the following comment of my own--
Writing is primarily a means of communication, and I think you would better communicate your points if you were more concise. Stop trying to show off and get to the point.
And you misspelled Caesar.
Andrew, it was me. I read a lot of books in a few days and spewed them up undigested on your blog. It was just for fun. I thought the 'one man's meat' reference would give me away. (haven't read that, though, it was a blind reference). You got the gist, though. In general, it upsets me when indie kids undermine themselves with an end run towards some subcategory of the 'worst'. The feeling that we can't produce something new, interesting, and worthwhile is understandable when everything's been done and nothing is sacred. A dose of irony is inevitable. I better shut up before I get preachy. The point is, your blog is very valuable to your readers. It's probably not very valuable to my Aunt Martha.
Clay
indie kid? hah
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