Shit Up to Your Neck
When you're in the shit up to your neck, there's nothing left to do but sing.
-Samuel Beckett
It was pointed out to me a while back that a certain minor literary wannabe in town (he of the Kickstarter campaign so he could afford an office space away from his family) was the actual Angry White in Chicago while I was mostly a poser AWG. I balked at the time because what had started out as a satirical stab at the miserable assholes online had become sort of my brand.
Recent events have proven Ray correct. I was the poser and he of the Faux Overlord category is the real deal - a self aggrandizing narcissist with a great bitterness about his marginalized place in the world who spends an awful lot of his time writing brilliant prose criticizing those far more successful than he. Recent events reminded me that the key to avoiding that poisonous state is a sense of humor about myself.
Granted, in those moments of July when I unnecessarily lashed out (few and far between) I found myself neck deep in shit and pissed off about it but with no realization of the absurdity of the situation.
Plainly, I was taking myself and my reputation in a tiny slice of society FAR too seriously.
As I slowly discard the trappings of the AWG and adopting that of the Literate Ape, I'm being hit with the sense memory of being able to see the buffoon that is myself. The ridiculous state of affairs presented to be completely thrown off my game by ginned up false accusations and a choir of ex-girlfriends and people who knew me decades ago jumping on to - let's be candid - call me names. The absolute hilarity of people online having never met me once chiming in with "I don't know the guy but what an asshole!"
It is not lost on me that in a macrocosm of my own experience, this lack of humor has infected the vast majority of people in the world. An almost non-stop shaming of comics has become the standard practice of both Right and Left Wing organizations as if being made fun of is worse than actual injustices. The polemic nature of online discourse has chased those uninterested in the dull, thumping wet sound of jaws flapping in back and forth ALL CAPS SCREAMING away from social media. Funny that the easiest thing to forget in the constant posing and demanding of respect is the obvious - we are all a bunch of fucking idiots just biding time until we die.
Cue Beckett. When you can see you are completely submerged in a world of shit, why not sing? Why not laugh? Why not see first how insane you are and let that view extend to the rest of the herd? To paraphrase a Joe Janes line "If Nero's fiddling as Rome burned was so bad, do you think they'd rather die with no music at all?"
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UPDATE: Guess I was right about the Overlord...
