“Wise people treasure knowledge, but the babbling of a fool invites disaster.”
~Proverbs 10:14
“Asked one day for a mathematical formula for success in his life, Albert Einstein gave the following: ‘If A is success in life, the formula is A equals X plus Y plus Z, X being work and Y being play.’ ‘And what is Z?’ he was asked. ‘Z,’ he said, ‘is keeping your mouth shut.'”
~ From 2500 Anecdotes for All Occasions by Edmund Fuller
Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve had “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey stuck in my head all week, and it’s difficult to think when the words “Make my wish come tru-oo-hoo, baby all I want for Christmas is you-hoo-hoo-oooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-hoo-ooh-hoo-hoo-ooh-hoo-ooooooooooh-hoooo-*five more minutes of continued riffing*!” are playing on repeat in the back of your subconscious.
I also got hung up on one of my blog posts.
See, being a young person– and not just a young person, but the kind of young person who invests money in a website dedicated to himself so he can share with the world all his wacky, radical, young person thoughts– I feel it is important to take strong, vitriolic stances on hot-button issues that I know absolutely nothing about so as to prove my worthiness and worldliness to the adult world. So, last week I told myself I was going to start making more of an effort to address more serious topics in these posts. Topics that really matter to me and society and the world at large.
So, that’s what I did.
After writing about 1500 words worth of adolescent nonsense, I realized that I have absolutely nothing to say about topics that matter to society and the world at large, and the topics that matter to me I don’t understand nearly enough to take any kind of a firm, coherent stance on. I have thoughts and feelings, sure, but these are nothing more than a jumbled stream of words and images darting around my brain that always come out sounding like a half-formed Dadaist poem when I attempt to put them down on paper.
The other option would be for me to give you a lazily constructed letter-collage of all the buzzwords, talking points, and statistics that I’ve accumulated from my skimmings through National Review and The New York Times that are somewhat reflective of the idea I’m trying to get across, but this isn’t very much fun.
So I’ve decided to spare you my incomplete opinions about Israel and Russia and how we as a society need to be more generally “aware” of “things” and whether having hair that looks like half-dissolved cotton candy should qualify as a high crime or misdemeanor, and instead stick to writing about things that I know– even if those topics don’t expand beyond the Denver Metro area.
Right now, I just want to develop my toolbox. I want to make sure that when I do have something important to say that I can say it exactly as I need to. And while I privately entertain the same fantasies as all blog people– the ones about eventually discovering “THE ANSWER” and going viral and single-handedly ringing in a new age of peace and harmony among all the peoples of the world wide web– one where the alt-right internet troll will lay down with the SJW activist and this tempest of partisanship and misunderstanding that we are all caught up in the middle of will at last be calmed– at the end of the day I know that I’m just starting out here. And I know that even when I’ve finished, even when I’ve at last peeled back all the layers of this thing that I’m getting at– assuming that I don’t go completely mad in the process and devolve into Jaden Smith (which is very possible)– I’ll still have only attained a tiny portion of “THE ANSWER,” and even this will soon be forgotten and humanity will have to re-discover all over again in a thousand years or so (assuming of course that humanity is still around then, and hasn’t been completely obliterated by the Republicans’s secret plan to secretly destroy us all with their super secret Republican schemes that James Comey can’t tell us about yet because it isn’t safe.)
Anyway, all that pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo to say– I don’t want to waste your time with my pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo. You have your own pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo to deal with, and you’d be much better off finding life’s answers yourself rather than spending your time clawing through this endless wasteland of empty buzzword-collages searching for someone else to provide the answers for you.
From this point forward, I’m just here for yucks.
-S.P.
The Scottyssey 