There’s something about Back to the Future that’s always bugged me: the time travel.
Not the mechanics of it – you tell me a DeLorean WITHOUT special equipment can travel through time if it goes fast enough, and I’m pretty likely to believe you – but the results.
This is what my job is: to take the ordinary elements of my daily life, and talk about them in such a way as they appear to be relevant. Other, better writers than I are able to evoke emotion and meaning from the simplest events, using the thoroughly ordinary as metaphor through which they can explore the intricacies of the human soul. I don’t really want to do that. I’d much prefer to take ordinary things, and use them to explain to you how the world is on the verge of collapse.
Take, for example: turkey.
A new phone, coupled with emotional stress from the theft of my mug at work means one thing: I was distracted from writing a decent post for today. So I’m going to cheat.
”What’s the deal with Twitter?” I have been asked/overheard at work but didn’t want to get involved in the discussion. The actual question, which people mean but are too polite to phrase this way, is “Why the fuck do I need to care about something that sounds, to me, stupid?”
It started with insomnia. Just me, lying awake at night, listening to the radiator tick, listening to something in the basement hissing away (it might have been the hot water heater, I’m not sure), listening to my roommate shuffle around upstairs with his insomnia, to the cars on the street that sometimes pass by at one in the morning and leave en masse at two in the morning when all the bars close, and everyone drunkenly tools along home. I have never heard an accident while lying awake at night, and sometimes I wonder what I would do if I did hear an accident. Would I go out and help? I like to think that I would help, but, in the first place, I’m not sure what I could do that would be helpful, and in the second place, sometimes it’s very cold outside.
Whoah, the news! Here is a post from Jezebel about how PETA has begun a campaign to rebrand “fish” as “sea kittens,” so that they will miraculously become too cute for anyone to eat.
They’ve got a whole campaign and everything!
I know what you’re thinking. It’s this: “Hey, you know, that’s not a bad idea. People don’t think of fish as being cuddly. Maybe if they do, people won’t eat them!”
*Not literally
One of my favorite gags is the misuse of the word “literally.” It’s one of those linguistic ticks, like overuse of hyperbole or misunderstanding of irony (and hey, thanks to Alanis Morrisette, even my compass is off for what’s ironic and what’s just damn weird). Read more »
“You should go out to Hollywood to write for a living,” people – and by people, I 
mean “my mom,” whom I occasionally suspect is trying to get rid of me for some reason – suggest to me.
But will this really help my writing career? Sadly, I know the answer to this, and it’s two words long: Shane Black.
This is probably going to end up provoking some new kind of incident, but there are days when I just can’t help myself. Here is Roissy, a DC proponent of “Pick-Up Artistry,” which is when you measure your value as a man according to how many women you have sex with.
See this? This is exactly the shit that I was talking about, this idea that the point of masculinity is to indulge in douchebaggery, rather than to rise above it.
Before heading into the new year, it’s important to think about what 2008 has taught me. It’s been an educational year – new job, long relationship with my loving and patient girlfriend, lots and LOTS of posts here at Threat Quality and over at I Speak TV…can’t help but learn a little bit, right?
I mean, I’m not stupid, right?
Read more »
Well, Jeff already did his music post, and he also knows more about writing about music than I do. In fact, I don’t know if there’s anyone more patently unqualified to write about music than me; I don’t even know how to listen to music.
I know that sounds like it doesn’t mean anything, but it does. All of you guys, with your favorite bands and your opinions and shit, you’ve been listening to so much music for so long that you’ve probably forgotten that when you listen to it, you are practicing a specific skill. This is a skill that seems like a natural thing, like a, “Oh, yeah, you just listen to it, you know? Like when you’re walking, how do you walk? You just do it.” kind of a thing, up until you meet someone that doesn’t actually know how.
Then I look like I’ve got some kind of brain damage.
