The absence of category

If you leave a puppy in the dark he’ll smell his way back home

I wonder if there’s ever been a time where neighboring convention centers are both hosting events for “pickup artists” — only one of them is a conference about applying custom paint jobs to your pickup truck, and the other one is for people who are sharing dating tips and tricks about how you “pick up” a man friend or lady friend for romantic liaison purposes.

I think if I were a hotel or convention center event manager in charge of signage and room designation and I saw the upcoming events get booked and realized what was going on, it might be too much to resist. The responsible thing to do would be to put them in rooms as far apart as possible in your venue and make really good signage or even propose to one of them that they come up with a subtitle for their event … but I think I’d be inclined to put them as awkwardly close together as the venue could possibly allow, and somehow insert myself into their session naming process so that you could give all the events names which at first read as boring descriptions of painting a truck, but then turn into double entendrés when you read them a little differently.

I mean just imagine a guy sitting in a session hearing about how he’s supposed to insult his truck in order to make it more interested in him. That’s just good, classic, wholesome stuff right there.

Is there a guy who found a way to exercise every muscle?

A popular assessment of poets and poetry is that it’s a beautiful art of words, rich with metaphor and allusion which helps the reader get to a higher level and more personal interpretation of the ideas in the poem. In this world view, poets are celebrated, classic poems are read and taught to children in schools, and art committees will take time to hand out awards for poetry.

As an aside here, we should have more “laureates” of stuff. You hear about poet laureates and Nobel laureates and whatnot. People who (I guess?) have had a laurel wreath placed upon their head with the implication being “hey, we hereby acknowledge you as good at your thing and encourage you to keep doing it” or whatever. We should start making laureates of like, baristas.

I don’t share this view of poetry. I think poets are bad writers who need to knock it off with all the metaphors and just friggin tell us what they are thinking. I want efficiency and precision and crispness. If you could have send me a one sentence email instead of your 90 line poem, just do that! Some good, tight prose will beat long flowing poetry every day. If you notice a friend or family member starting to write poetry, odds are that they are in the midst of a horrific MENTAL FOG and you might want to step in and involve yourself, encouraging them to edit their words for clarity and just write a damn tweet or blog post like the rest of us please.

I’ll make an exception here for people writing songs and music. At least in that case you made some SICK BEATS first and then there’s a logistical challenge of making some words that sit well on top of those beats so I can respect that.

My fingerprints don’t work in the winter time

There are lots of groups of people who I am simultaneously both disgusted with and secretly envious of. Amongst these groups are the group of people who can stand in a grocery store line and just casually chat on a video call on their phone while calmly and slowly advancing their items down the aisle.

I’m disgusted by their behavior because it shows a complete abdication or lack of understanding around the shared social compact we should all be in at the grocery store; which is that we don’t want to be there and need to collaborate to swiftly and urgently get ourselves out of there. I need you to be at full attention, head on a swivel, ready to keep moving, get out of the way, advance your items, load your cart, pay quickly, etc. It’s not a time for phone calls. Do that in your own space on your own time.

On the flip side, how great must it be to be so oblivious to what’s happening all around you that you remain unaffected by the inner turmoil and ire and urgency of the people behind you in line while you just keep yakking it up with your buddy on the phone, take your sweet time locating your checkbook, and gum up the whole grocery operation. It must be blissful.