Guh-blegh

I wanted a title to accurately sum up my current health and mood. I may not have hit the mark perfectly here, but I feel I came close enough that the gist, such as it is, will be conveyed. The long and irritating story made short is hay-fever. It’s a wonderful thing that strolls around the world hanging out where ever spring happens to be. Here, it turns out.

To further the blegh is work. For those unaware I do that security thingy at a Wal-mart; valiantly arresting people who commit petty theft. It’s not a terribly exciting job but it can certainly be frustrating sometimes. Notably today when people insisted upon taking hours to decide not to steal. It happens every now and then; there’s a group of individuals who intend to steal going into the store, but one of the group has a conscience-attack and tries to talk the others out of it. What’s worse is when it takes forever and then, damn them, they succeed. It means I have to follow an obnoxiously loud group of idiots around the store for however long their entirely too heated debate goes on just incase they do steal at the end of it. Today they did not, and thus I was amazingly frustrated. That sort of thing gets on the nerves.

It seems those two things combined means I finally get to make a shorter post, because I’m too annoyed to bother going over the details for the umpteenth time. It probably wouldn’t be good for my sanity anyways.  

A Firm Basis in Reality

I get in philosophical arguments a lot. I wouldn’t exactly call it a hobby, I can’t say I really actively seek them out; I just have an odd lot of friends. This odd lot of friends has a tendency to bring up arguments ranging from politics, religion and philosophy to the merits of movies and games with a frequency that – I’ve been assured – means it’s utterly impossible that we should still be friends. The last is only enhanced by the fact that our views concerning, oh, virtually everything above are incredibly divergent. We cover the political spectrum of our region, are diverse in our beliefs and tend to argue philosophies over weeks rather than mere nights. The really isn’t any purpose behind them all bar entertaining ourselves. You see, we find them a bizarre sort of fun. This has of course led to a number of arguments I’ve had with people who don’t fit into this weird little collection of friends that weren’t entirely anticipated. You see, when you hammer out personal ideas and concepts over half a dozen years of rigorous nick-picking it seems you get some very well supported thoughts that occasionally run contradictory to what we’ll call conventional wisdom, and the urge to spout these things at the damndest moments.

A regular patron of this phenomenon would be our title today; ‘a firm basis in reality’. It’s how I like to phrase it at any rate, and it’s a concept my friends and I agreed upon in rather short order if I recall correctly. It’s one of the most important things to have when making an argument – I won’t say the most important simply to avoid sparking another one of those week long debates, but establishing the need for it usually goes without complaint. The idea is simplistic; whenever an idea or concept is brought up concerning society or politics (or whatever’s on the menu that day for arguing) whoever proposes it needs to have a firm grasp on how it’ll actually react when introduced to reality itself, or the basis of the argument become hypothetical and irrelevant to actual changes that could be brought about. This isn’t to say hypothetical arguments have no place themselves, it’s just a category a lot of people don’t like their idea getting shuffled into.

For example; utopia can easily brought about - if everyone got along together and worked to make it so. Making such happen in reality is notably harder because people tend to be bastards, and consequently won’t do that, so the argument ‘if everyone got along together’ doesn’t really have any merit in the face of how people actually function.

This becomes a problem when you realize how often this is actually used in an argument. It isn’t every single time some one uses the word ‘if’ when describing their idea, but its damned close. To further exasperate things; in my experience the people who make that fallacy tend to have a hard time grasping why it doesn’t work. The idea that they can’t just change reality or basic human nature to make their concept work isn’t one that readily comes to them. I believe it stems from the fact that they perceive the aspect of humanity that ruins their idea as flawed, and thus dismiss it as an element that would simply disappear once confronted by their obviously superior logic. Human stubbornness is both extremely prevalent and apparently something we’re completely unaware of at the same time, oddly enough even when exhibiting it.

Anyways, it’s come up a couple times recently and started to kind of annoy me. I realize I could just, y’know, not break apart people’s ideas by pointing out how they’d never succeed, but I keep getting the misfortune of coming across fairly arrogant people who make these mistakes. And god-dammit, I have an enormous ego. It’s impossibly hard not to dramatically deflate some one else’s – especially when you think they’re a prick.  

Story Writing

I’ve got some ‘up and coming’ news today folks. Josh has gotten back into the swing of writing and managed to whip up a short story. It’ll be one of the first peeks into the world he’s making and I’m fairly certain he’ll be willing to have it posted here for our vast and sprawling audience to enjoy. I haven’t had a look at it yet myself, but that’s just a matter of shuffling some e-mails along. With any luck it should around the blog before the end of the week. Furthermore it managed to make me think; an act precious and rare these days.

I got it in my head that I should take a mad swing at making a short story to complement his and see what I could learn about the process. (Notice the sub-title on the header up there? Yeah) It was then I ran into an issue; stories are hard. Stories aren’t like blogging at all, and when you’ve not bothered writing one in eons it’s more than a bit of bitch to get back into the swing of things. I figured I could just waltz my way into Word and hammer out a couple pages about whatever took my fancy and we’d have a dual-piece good to go. That didn’t happen. On the plus side, I’ve learned a few things, and one of them is about pride.

I think I’ve gotten this blogging thing down pat. One of my earliest problems with making posts was the worry that somewhere out in the world, some strange person might read everything I’ve written and – oh here’s the kicker – not like it. Consequently I never really made posts unless I thought I had a huge topic all laid out in my head. There’s still a healthy amount of lingering influences of that sort of thinking floating around this place. You might note almost all of my posts are at least 400-500 words in length. It’s not because I think that number is special or that people are more liable to read posts of that length – no, I just tend to sit around refusing to make a post until I can conjure up a thought (or enough thoughts) to fill up that much space. It seems like it’s not a real post unless I have a rather substantial amount of text on my screen before I hit ‘publish’. It’s been an irritating habit I’ve both been temped to try obliterate and been mildly thankful for at the same time. After all, on one hand it means I tend to make rather big ol’ posts that absolutely no one wants to read and means this place will continue to have zero readers into the future, but on the other it means I get more typing done and might someday (after the millionth word) get a style that suits me.

Story writing, yes even short story writing has presented a similar and amplified problem. I don’t feel like I can make anything good out of a small tiny little idea that’d only take a handful of paragraphs to get out and consequently end up refusing to really write anything. It gets worse when I finally come up with an idea I don’t immediately despise only to realize it’d take at least a dozen pages to write it out in full, and I start worrying that it’ll be too long. This is compounded by the pride issue I mentioned way up above – I’m worried some one might dare judge me on what I write. The latter is an issue that I’ve oddly enough managed to cut out of the way entirely when blogging, so it left me a touch confused when it came back in such force now.

I realize the best solution to all this might be to take the same approach we’ve seen some success in with blogging and vlogging. Take a mad stab at it and even if you fail horribly at least you’ll have learned something and it costs little more than pride to simply reset and try again. It’s just saying (or typing) that tends to be a hell of a lot easier than finding the motivation to do it. A blog is easy; you sit down and begin to type with only the faintest idea of what you want to say in mind. Hit the keyboard and go. Stories need at least some semblance of planning in mind; an outline so things actually make sense and keep a good pace. All that still applies if you want to make a short story and it leaves a huge amount of room for self doubt. This means I needed to come up with a better idea, y’know, besides just violently hitting Josh for bringing this up.

The best of the best my brain could come up with on short notice is collaboration. This is to say at some point in the coming week we’re going to dust off Josh’s story and fancy it up before posting the thing, when doing so I think I’m going to have to interrogate him on his world again. With some luck and an endless supply of questions I’ll hopefully come across some element of it that needs to be fleshed out properly, and I’ll do my best, as dubious of a statement as that might be. I’d make a promise here that it’ll get posted soon, but we’re still running on the new policy, so hell if I know when I’ll get this done. Wish me the best of luck and maybe we won’t all go insane reading whatever I produce.

A warning though; if you do start bleeding from the eyes when you read it please stop. I don’t have the money to pay for any potential bills that come with handling crazy people.