Too young to go stale

The worst thing about writing is trying to remember what I've already written. Did I already make x comparison? Did I use y joke in z post last year? Have I already used these letters for variables I may need to bring up later?

It's an excercise in futility in the end. You'll probably recycle a thought or borrow a simile from your previous work and not even know you did it. A lot of times I throw in a key word that I already used in the previous sentence without noticing and it totally kills any rhythm. If I can't remember what I wrote literally 21 words ago, the odds that I'll be able to write a full paragraph without plagiarizing myself at least three or four times can't be good.

I read a few posts recently on a big sports blog ripping apart a national columnist for whipping out a favorite phrase over and over again like a dirty, smelly security blanket and I thought, "Thank God no one reads anything I write."

There are certain trends and flourishes I use that I already know about and that will probably accompany my writing forever. Flourishes like periods. I really like using periods. I know. It's cliche.

It's great to have a style until someone cracks your formula and every subsequent bit of writing borders on self parody. I call this the Christopher Walken Effect. At one point Christopher Walken starred in movies like The Deer Hunter. Then every comedian on the planet developed a spot-on Walken impression and suddenly nothing Walken said could be taken seriously anymore. Thus Walken found himself relegated to making movies like The Country Bears and taking on parts where he was married to John Travolta. Now Walken wanders the Earth from talk show to talk show, lending his unusual cadence to poems and song lyrics not written with him in mind while the audience laughs. With each self-deprecating performance, he reinforced his vocal notoriety until he was stuck in an infinite loop the likes of which only William Shatner and Deep Movie Trailer Voice Guy can truly understand.

Sometimes it's easy to identify the things you overdo. For instance, I used get violently nauseous when I tried to write an entire piece without at least one reference to an early 90s cartoon show. Luckily, when I reached my teenage years, I ninja kicked this bizarre mutation to the curb. Turtles.

But I think it's inevitable that eventually everyone becomes stale. It happens with TV shows all the time. The formula gets old, but the show has formed its boundaries and it's impossible to break out of them by the third or fourth season. It's tough for writers to decide that, hey, maybe Jack Bauer had a really lighthearted day and spent it goofing off with his friends eating ice cream and getting into non-explosion related trouble. Like maybe in one episode his hands get sticky from all the ice cream and his gun gets stuck to his hand while they're at the baseball game.

Sometimes people just go with what sells. Fans get used to one thing and encourage the writer to keep pumping out the same dreck. Reading the Redwall books was great when I was little until I realized I could rip out a couple pages from one book in the series and glue them in another and the result would be only mild confusion on the part of the reader that all the characters had suddenly assigned each other new nicknames. The way I remember it, one third of a Redwall novel was descriptions of food. The rest was rodent combat culminating in a showdown between a young hero mouse and a pirate.

I think getting stale is usually an accident... mostly a byproduct of getting lazy and not spending enough time broadening your repertoire, but sometimes also just a result of our frustratingly limited brains.

Anyway, I think there's some kind of pride to be had in going stale. You probably didn't mold for one. And for two, enough people paid attention to what you were doing that they got tired of you.

I hope they write, "We read everything he had to say and then some" on my grave.

The very hostile caterpillar

I spend a lot of time thinking about relationships and my friends. My family used to call me a social butterfly which a) I don't think describes me at all and b) is possibly one of the worst terms I've ever heard.

Especially when applied to a guy.

Guys aren't supposed to be butterflies. Guys aren't even supposed to take notice of butterflies unless they're under a microscope and then mounted because maybe this particular guy isn't a very good hunter, but dammit, he needs something to put over his fireplace.

When I hear "social butterfly," it makes me think of someone nervously interacting with everyone and trying desperately to make friends with each individual at the cost of getting to know anyone. That's not me. I know who I get along with. Unfortunately, that's not everyone. In fact, it's not even half of you out there. A lot of you are too old. Some of you are Dallas Cowboys fans. At least one or two of you have flicked me off in traffic.

And some of you just rub me the wrong way. Guy I don't know nodding and winking at me knowingly when an attractive girl walks by: I will leave you hanging when you try to fist bump me later. Girl I've never met before asking me lots of uncomfortable personal questions and then rolling your eyes when I don't answer: I will probably accept your friendship request on Facebook later, but rest assured I will do so VERY RELUCTANTLY.

My ex-girlfriend used to insist on being friendly with everyone. She'd tell me sometimes that some of her friends were friends of convenience who she probably wouldn't hang out with under other circumstances. Every time she told me this, a different part of my brain would not-so-spontaneously combust. I could not wrap my head around the idea that she was friends with people just for the sake of being friends and this was ESPECIALLY difficult to grasp with bits of my skull exploding. One time after a particularly nasty grey matter eruption (thesaurus in action), I had to relearn how to smile. Not that anyone noticed... and actually it's possible I forgot how while I was busy not making friends with people and generally being grumpy.

It wasn't hard for her to make friends and that made the whole thing that much more confusing. She just wanted to fit in. Now I'm not saying that she would have joined the Nazi party if she lived in 1930's Germany just because everyone else was doing it, I'm just saying that she's my ex-girlfriend, so I've got a lot of mean, irrelevant things to say about her.

Anyway, is there a rational reason to be annoyed at social butterflies? Probably not. It's a good instinct. People like that get good jobs and probably run into good people eventually. And I know I've got quite a few social butterflies among my friends. Let's face it, they're very nice people.

Still, I take close friendships very seriously and that whole butterfly thing probably isn't ever going to take root with me. Not just because I'm a dude and thus can't relate to butterflies or because I feel compelled to include something about explosions in everything I write in a very un-butterfly-like fashion.

No, it's mostly because I want my friends to matter. What is the point of thinking about explosions constantly unless you've got someone relevant to discuss it with? What's the point of having discussions about explosions unless you've got someone to reminisce about it with later? What's the point of reminiscing about talking about stuff blowing up unless the person you're reminiscing with really matters to you?

When I'm old and senile, I don't want to look back at my life and think, "Well, that certainly was an interesting, but forgettable cast of revolving characters in the long-running TV sitcom that metaphorically represents my life!" I want to think, "Hey, I wonder what happened to that guy who played my best friend in seasons 8 through 79. Oh, that's right... he's right here next to me talking about explosions."

An expanded tweet

Here's the problem with Twitter: It makes me even lazier than I already am.

Why flesh out a fleeting thought into an entire piece of writing when I can instead spend 15 minutes struggling to fit it all into 140 characters while trying not to cop out and turn whole words into single vowels? I suppose it forces me to write snappier sentences, but the fact that I've lost the patience needed to sit down and write a paragraph is troubling. At some point someone drilled into my head that paragraphs should generally be at least four or five sentences. I have to cheat to attain those kinds of lofty numbers. Here is a fifth sentence.

At any rate, Twitter was advertising a book for awhile that was a collection of the world's most humorous twitter posts (I refuse to call them "tweets" in this entry. I can use an infinite number of characters in this unrestricted space so there’s no need to shorten that phrase. In fact, let’s just go ahead and call them "user generated Twitter character strings").

Okay, I'll admit: If I was using Twitter, that gratuitous parenthetical comment wouldn't have made it to print and you'd remember what it was I was trying to tell you before I interrupted myself which was this: Twitter made a book of funny Twitter quotes (that's right, you may have noticed I used double colons in that sentence which is a rare grammatical feat. It comes in handy when you're being needlessly wordy and probably also if you have rectal cancer or have to take a really big poop).

The whole thing is 140-character quotes with the Twitter brand slapped on each sentence. That's it. That's the glue that holds the book together. If you traveled back in time, renamed the project "The Hilarious Book of Really Short Sentences Often with Awkward Abbreviations," and tried to get a publishing deal, someone would probably point out that that's a really awful title. Then that person would go on to tell you that "really short sentences" is not a theme, it's a stupid handicap on your ability to collect funny things. It's like opening a pet store and shaving all your puppies before you sell them.

Sometimes it helps to throw in a little fur even if you have to deal with the occasional tangle (parenthetical or otherwise).

You never send flowers

I have never received a love letter. Not one. Not even a really heartfelt "A" or "H." It confuses and hurts me that no one cares enough about me to write their feelings down and hand them to me instead of telling me face to face.

Maybe all the girls I meet just think I'm really environmentally conscious because they noticed I recycle so they didn't want to waste paper. Also email's out without buying carbon emissions offsets and let's be honest, have you seen the price of carbon these days? It's used in practically everything.

Or maybe I'm missing something.

-A few of my friends have received love letters. If I could use only one word to describe them it would be "girls." This is probably one of those skills you have to be born with. It's kind of like in the NBA when a general manager says, "You can't teach height" so they draft the guy who's seven feet tall instead of the guy who can dribble and speak the same language as the other guys on the team. But really, it's more like in the WNBA when a general manager says, "You can't teach girl" and drafts a woman who can't dunk instead of Michael Jordan.

-My ex-girlfriend received a love letter once. She is a heartless, soulless human husk. I can't hope to achieve this. Lobotomies are illegal in the United States now and I am a law abiding citizen.

-That one guy in that one movie I never saw got a love letter. He was really hot. I would probably have to work out a lot to look like him. One time my friends and I got in my car and drove to Taco Bell, Burger King, and a Chinese restaurant to get food for one big dinner. It was a crazy night. I will probably never look like that one actor.

Sometimes when I go to bed alone at night, I console myself with the thought that maybe there are hundreds of illiterate women out there who simply lack the words to tell me how they feel. If you meet one, please offer to transcribe her message. I will reimburse you later.