I Hope You Find Some Humor in This
Some asshole suggested I put buttons on my website. Buttons make up a suit—and my website isn’t a business. I don’t need buttons to look important. I call him an asshole but he is actually a close friend of mine. “A close friend of mine suggested…” sounds too delicate; like paper mache. It also makes me appear transparent. Everyone knows that you don’t want people to see right through you because then you mustn’t get straight to business.
The Japanese have a saying, “The nail that sticks up is the one that gets pounded down.” I’m sure it originally aired in their native language but I took it upon myself to translate it for you. Americans act like they don’t subscribe to this, but then why all this fetishism towards conformity? The answer to that can be found in another question: What’s going on? This casual conversation opener is the essence of contemporary confusion. A common response is “nothing much.” Excellent. Just as expected.
For the past two or three years I’ve been using the response, “a lot.” Anyone with a half-opened mind would see this as a sign of engagement, whereas most people disregard it as being cocky or different. Ever meet somebody at a party who goes out of their way to be different? Most people find that irritable, so they avoid doing it altogether.
You need to go out of your way to be different in the modern world. There are so many fucking people that it’s too easy for big businesses to condition us on a mass scale. One technique is investing. Invest in the way people feel about a socio-political issue. Another technique is swindling. Make people feel left out if they don’t subscribe to an idea or purchase the latest model. This is a sure-fire way to make us feel vulnerable towards one another.
If “love” were an animal, it would be one of the poisonous toads on the endangered species list. It would be classified under least concerned and nobody would be doing a damn thing about it. Maybe if it were cute and cuddly like the panda, people would pay more attention. The cane toad has no place in the functioning food chain; you probably never even seen one. That’s what love is—rare, unseen, unadmired; and one day if you find it you become timid of its venomous bite and poor hygiene. It’s not very romantic until you pick it up and embrace it, but even getting that far is unforeseeable as you’ve already reserved everything in the “different” category for ugliness.
The problem with being on your last rope is that if someone cuts it from above you can no longer hang yourself. There’s too much ugliness in the world. One look from atop a parking garage on Beaver Avenue would cause enough confusion to make the manliest of men jump, which is why I always bring a friend.
-- ASE
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