Holding A Grudge

Not reserved for people who’ve been wronged, holding a grudge is also a novel way to occupy your time. You might be wondering about this new sport. “How do I join in the action?” The first requirement is another person. It takes at least two. Although I’ve heard of someone holding a grudge against the entire NHL organization, it’s much easier with smaller numbers. The grudge against the NHL didn’t last long because there was no way to vent to everyone at once, not to mention the teams got better the following year, so there was no longer a point to the grudge.

Likewise, it’s good to hold a grudge against those you know, because you see them more often and you can call them out by name. Plus, you probably know something about them few other people know, so the insults can be really juicy.

The only other real requirement is that you can communicate your grudge somehow, like speaking the same language. If, for instance, you hold a grudge against your neighbor for never trimming that apple tree so it stops dropping apples in your yard, it won’t do much if your neighbor speaks Swahili and you speak French. I don’t know how many Swahili speaking people there are in the world, it was just a far-out language I could use as an example.

Next you’ll need to know how to do it. Some grudge jocks prefer the method of passive-agressive insults, others like to play demeaning jokes on the focus of their grudge. One man in Florida intentionally moved three houses away from someone so he could leave little “gifts” by their door. The gifts ranged from stolen bicycles to stolen backhoes. He was trying to get his grudge neighbor arrested. Eventually he was the one who got arrested, but at least he played the sport like a champ. No doubt about it, he’s a legend in the grudge sport hall of fame.

In another historical grudge match, one man held a grudge against former President Jimmy Carter. That man is now dead and Jimmy Carter lives on. Looks like Jimmy had the last laugh on that one.

One of the best, most successful, grudge stars is Dean Koontz. It’s claimed among the literary community that he held a grudge against one person for so long he managed to write them into every one of his 497 books. He changed their name of course, but the person he held a grudge against has been shot, stabbed, set on fire, drowned, buried alive, lobotomized, colonoscopized, dismembered, dragged behind horses, whipped, throttled, and drowned again—all symbolically, of course.

Whatever your preferred method of holding and taking action on your grudge, remember these wise words from Confucius:

“Tolerance is for those who don’t know any good pranks.”

Fire Isn’t Hot?

There are many new trends wanting desperately to take a grip on the collective consciousness. They make claims that amount to nothing more than denial of the obvious.

Denying what is objectively quantifiable is an exercise of confusion. If the point of the argument is to prove the dazed quality of the one making the argument, then the argument is successful. Otherwise, there is no point in chasing the abstract ideas of the bumfuzzled few.

It won’t be long until they’re trying to convince everyone, “Fire isn’t hot.”

One of the first reasons we humans had of identifying things we might call “fire”, and things which are “hot”, was to keep people safe. We made the definitions and slapped the labels down on the items most likely to hurt, harm, and burn.

It’s not likely the reason for the invention of the words was to confuse the genetically obtuse of a later day. The reason was the same for the dazed and confused as it was for the average citizen and the obscenely intelligent: so they could know before irreversible harm was done.

Why would anyone want to try to organize the language in a confusing way? If it was reorganized for the confused few, would it be less confusing to them? Of course not. Those who want to deny the obvious will only continue to rue the reality that surrounds them.

Don’t worry, though. These trends will die and others will take their place. Like a flame fades, turns the fire’s fuel to smoke and ashes, so will the new trends fade.

Uni-ball Pen

For the absolute best pens in the Uni-verse, you need to search no further than Uni-ball.

Whenever I’m writing anything in public, people gaze longingly at my fine writing instrument. Whenever I loan my pen to someone so they can write, they always say, “Ooh, this is a great pen. What kind is it?”

Of course, I tell them, “It’s a Uni-ball!”

No one can resist the allure of a Uni-ball.

Now you might be wondering where you can find such an excellent writing instrument. Many office supply stores carry the Uni-ball brand. However, I’ve recently noticed the stores near me don’t stock my favorites: the Uni-ball Signo RT Gel Ultra Micro 0.38. A quick search of Uni-ball’s web site and they do indeed still make them. Why don’t the stores carry these amazing pens when they carry many other Uni-ball products? I haven’t asked yet. But I will.

Regardless of the reason for not stocking the best of the best, I really enjoyed browsing the Uni-ball site. You’re sure to enjoy it too. Who knows, you might find your favorite style of Uni-ball pen there as well.

Here’s a link for your convenience: https://www.uniball.com/home/index.html

Mars and Cupid

Romance novels.

They are loved and hated, adored and avoided, treasured and spurned. Not at all unlike rap music and country music. People tend to either love or hate. It’s rare to get anyone on the fence about them.

Here’s a new way to see it: Romance novels are necessary.

Though it’s probably rare to find boys reading anything from the Romance shelves, boys are the ones who need it the most. They need to learn about the ‘birds and the bees’.

In a world full of absentee fathers, where else will a boy learn what he needs to know about girls? Hopefully not from that absentee father. And if the boy doesn’t learn about it from anyone, he’ll still learn something from that absentee father. He’ll learn to emulate. He might begin to think it’s just what men do: make babies and run.

Well, but then couldn’t it be argued that’s a message published by the Romance style of books? It’s a definite possibility. My personal experience with romance novels is not broad. I tried to read Nabokov not too long ago, and it made me have the dry heaves. Regardless of my aversion to the story Lolita, I did learn. I learned something about the psychology of a pedophile. And I also learned more than one thing about writing. How to write well, and how to write poorly.

Aside from those things, reading Lolita didn’t make me want to read more so-called Romance books. This article, however, is not about Nabokov. It’s about how necessary romance is in fiction. And how dudes need to read more. Dudes don’t often get themselves educated. They don’t often read, or even be found reading. Which is why they use the word ‘dude’ a lot—even when talking about females.

Terribly non-romantic. How many guys who walk around calling the females in their lives ‘dude’ are learning how to treat a lady with respect? A few maybe, but they’re the exceptions. And I bet the exceptions grow mature enough (eventually) to differentiate between male and female and then (eventually) stop calling everyone dude all the time.

To rectify the lack of dudes reading Romance, I think we need to branch that tired old genre out. It needs more links to sci-fi and horror and motorcycle maintenance. Or we could flip that idea right on its head and say all of these categories need to be linked to Romance.

It’s a long shot, I know. What are the chances that the trend of cowardly runaway fathers will decrease if we make romantic space operas? Or romantic horror-fests? Would it actually get men reading? Would it actually make them more honorable or loyal?

We’ll never know until we try.

Requirements of Comedy

Requirements for Comedy

  1. Be mostly stupid. Comedy doesn’t require you to think scientifically, or mathematically, or philosophically, or logically. You can let your intellect blow away on the breeze, if you like. Or you can let it slip down into your crotch, into your underclothes (front or back, it doesn’t really matter), and then use the groin area for much of your thinking.
  2. Hyperbole greased over by exaggeration and enflamed with excessive lies. Tell lies at every turn. Life isn’t interesting enough for the comedy scene, so spice it up! Make the story funny by adding flavor on the flavor. Never settle for mediocre anything. If the main character is about to die, say they died, not only once, but twice. Let them be eaten by the wild animal, run over by speeding traffic, burned by massive mixtures of chemicals, infested with alien eggs, shocked by putting both hands in the toaster, and consumed by a super colony of angry red ants.
  3. Wax political. Naturally, if you combine the first two ingredients for comedy, stupidity and hyperbole, you come up with a cauldron full of politics. Stir it together and create a magical monstrosity.
  4. Make comparisons of anything and everything. Not everything has an opposite, but everything can be compared to everything else. Because of this, comparisons are limitless, boundless, endless, not to mention, infinite. For instance, if you needed a punchline about nachos, let everyone ponder over how they’re so similar to fingers, wait the appropriate amount of time, then tell them how both go crunch when put them in a vice. Which brings us to our next requirement:
  5. Timing. It should be obvious to not start with the punchline, and it should be obvious to not give the punchline immediately after the lead-in. Let the audience stew over what you tell them. Make them guess a little. They may even come up with something clever and creative you hadn’t thought of yet. Along the same lines, some details should be given in rapid-fire fashion. Pace is part of timing, as much as correlation is. Pacing is not the art of walking across a stage then back again, but the art of sending the audience on a ride at the speed necessary—sometimes that speed is haltingly slow, other times it’s breakneck. Correlation means mixing topics. The art of correlation can be spectacular or disastrous. Having two jokes too close together can create a third mixed image in the audience’s minds. Say you talked or wrote about underwear in one instance and then about flavors and spices in the next. The reader or listener could potentially come away from that with a bizarre image of cooking in underwear. This is good or bad, depending on your intentions. Were you going for the gross-out? Or did you accidentally make your audience sick?
  6. Then, there’s the art of the obscene. Too many fart jokes will establish you as an amateur. Too many gross-outs will most likely turn people away. They’ll begin to avoid your brand of entertainment. Once they know what you’re about, they’ll print a mental category on you, and likely it’s where you’ll stay.