Two weeks ago, The Onion wrote an article called “Time Between Thing Being Amusing, Extremely Irritating Down To 4 Minutes”. The article quotes fake research data showing new memes come and go quicker than ever before, with most people realizing after just 90 seconds that the thing was never funny to begin with.
They predict that by the year 2023 the feelings of amusement and irritation will happen simultaneously, “the two emotions effectively canceling each other out and leaving one feeling nothing whatsoever.”
It would be fantastic if every living human being were as intelligent as an Onion editor.
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I woke up this morning and stumbled to my computer in the dark. I’m usually up before the sun. I read an article about towns so desperate for taxes and utilities money they are actually giving lots of land away for free, in exchange for the promise that you will build a house and live there for at least five years. Then I fell asleep on the couch.
I woke up for the second time this morning as Kristen was leaving to go to work. I stumbled back to the computer and had a new friend request on Facebook from Zeller, one of my best friends from middle school, who I haven’t seen since.
In middle school, Zeller and I worked together for four bucks an hour at his dad’s construction company. We would clean up nails the real workers would drop, we’d paint, whatever, we were cheap teenage labor. All cash, off the books, sorry IRS.
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I really dislike “random” as a genre. Of anything. Over the last decade, random has somehow become its own art form. And it depresses me.
Stringing together unrelated phrases and words is not art, it’s how a two year old learns to speak.
Yet without fail, these viral videos and songs and images that don’t say anything about anything get propped up with comments like “OMG, that was so random, I don’t know why but I love it”.
Ugh.
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I wrote a lot growing up. I wrote poems and short stories and crappy novels. Because writing was the one hobby I had that most of my aunts and uncles knew about, I got a lot of journals and decorative notebooks for birthdays and Christmases. I never used any of them. I stuck to lose leaf lined paper.
I was afraid to use the fancy journals! Blank notebooks, empty reams of typewriter paper – these are things of inspiration. But add just a single mark to the first page, and that inspiration starts to fade – the promise of what that journal could have become has been fulfilled.
I probably sound crazy now.
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About once every three months I get to be really depressed for a few minutes, and then really proud for a few minutes. O’Reilly, the publisher that released my YouTube book, sends me quarterly royalty statements. I just got one of those statements this morning.
This past quarter I sold 295 copies of my YouTube book. After two years of being available, that’s not too bad. The book sells at a retail price of $29.95, so that’s $8,835.25 for 295 copies sold. That means I’m taking everyone out to dinner at Red Lobster right? Hah, no.
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