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10 Reasons to be Antisocial

Everything important in your life, the correct decisions, the perfect work, the life-changing realizations, they all come when you are alone. Being antisocial provides you with the time for these.

1. Genius is antisocial
This does not mean that by being antisocial you automatically adopt the status of genius, but it does mean that if you, by some slim chance are, in fact, a genius, you will have no patience for average and below-average humanity. You will see it as annoying and distracting like a high-schooler being forced to endure a day in pre-school. You will seek to isolate yourself and work. Again, the choice to isolate yourself and work does not necessarily indicate genius, just a slightly higher possibility of it. Very slightly. Writing, painting, working on complex math problems, all solitary work for the most part. Genius needs room to concentrate.

2. Less drama
Which is not to say no drama. If you are human and you live around humans you will have drama. It does not matter if you mind your own business and keep to yourself, trust me, the cunts and assholes will find you. Being genuinely antisocial ensures that you will run into this less, which is not to say, never. Be ready for it, but going under the radar means that you probably won’t have to dig more than one shallow grave per decade.

3. You gain insight
You cannot ever be rid of people entirely. I know this, I have tried. Hell, even Howard Hughes, the modern prophet of anti-socialism still had to deal with his lawyers. People, however, will be reduced to bite-sized chunks. You will be able to analyze them as you take your breaks from analyzing more important things. Spend enough time thinking about enough data and you come to some pretty interesting conclusions. The fact is that most people reveal far more than is immediately obvious in the course of a casual conversation, you just have to put it under a microscope, which means it needs isolated, and you need private time look at it.

4. Relationships require effort
Usually of the non-rewarding kind. Relationships with chicks involve doing things that serve no practical purpose whatsoever, as gestures. Chicks love gestures. You take this much effort it means that you love me this much. The idea that there is no correlation between love and effort for a man never occurs to them. I think this all started with that old Percy Sledge song “When a Man Loves a Woman” in which the singer tells all the things men will do for women they love. It was BS made to sell records. Effort is what men put out when there is a tangible reward at the end of the job. Like sex. The gestures are all about sex, not to show affection. Those flowers are not merely because I know you like flowers and I want to make you happy, they are because I know you like flowers and I want to fuck you.

5. Conversation-padding
A 2-hour conversation usually only consists of about 10-20 minutes of actual worthwhile information sharing. The rest is padded out with small-talk, awkward pauses while somebody thinks of something to say, and boring droning that blends into the background for the listener. Long conversations usually only happen when both people are stuck in one place together and want the satisfaction of “having shared” at the end of their sentence, meaning that they want a conversation for the sake of having one, not because it actually makes sense to communicate. This results in a lot of your life being wasted talking to people and needless stress as you share meaningless nonsense.

6. Low expectations
Nobody expects you to be the life of the party, nobody comes knocking on your door at 3am looking for a shoulder to cry on. This means you don’t get invited to tedious functions and you get to avoid the truly thankless job of being a free therapist to your friends and acquaintances. Being antisocial means that people see you as a closed door, one that they might as well pretend is not there. This might sound like a bad thing, but it is not. We have been taught that happiness depends on being social, but there is no happiness, just the pretense of it. Why waste time looking for something that does not exist?

7. You get balls
What it is is that you don’t care what people think of you. It may bug you that some piece of trash out there has the balls to insult you (different from taking offense at the insult itself), but then you know they are a piece of trash and you get over it. Being insulted by someone you have no respect for is very different from being insulted by somebody who matters, who you at some point thought highly of. I will give you an example: your neighbor’s chihuahua barks at you from his owner’s front porch, does it offend you that this dog does not like you, or are you just irritated by the bark and annoyed that it does not know how small and contemptible it is? For the antisocial person everybody but a very select few (with whom you have limited contact) are chihuahuas. Fuck ‘em.

8. You don’t miss out on a whole lot
Most people have little to offer aside from the psychological comfort of being around another human being. They are not fun or interesting to anybody, least of all for the people who settle for them. In all but a few instances you could lose a relationship and feel very little, but even when you do, it’s pretty much always survivable. You lose that comfort from being around a particular person, but that’s more about adjusting to change than anything else. The point is that people are not all that important, not all that interesting, not all that fun, not all that essential. You would be making a better use of your time doing a crossword puzzle or learning a few words in a foreign language than hanging out with them.

9. Comforting self-deception
If you are just an antisocial moron, then it’s probably a good idea to isolate yourself so that you can tell yourself that you are, in fact a genius and that nobody recognizes what you are because they are all so stupid. Self-aggrandizing delusion needs isolation in order to reach it’s full annoying potential. It’s annoying to everybody else, but rewards the bearer with a tremendous sense of martyrdom which, in many cases, is the only reason they have to not commit suicide.

10. It helps you deal with loneliness
The most sociable, chatty, clingy, blowhards out there, the ones who try to spend as little time alone as possible, for them being alone is the same thing as being lonely. For the antisocial loneliness is very different from the sensation of being alone, they are two distinctly separate feelings. The anti-social can feel loneliness, but it’s rare. You treasure the moments with no distractions, no background movement, no responsibilities beyond what you have in front of you. That is largely, I suspect, a learned reaction to being alone a lot, but it’s good since everybody has to be alone at some point and it’s best to see it as a gift rather than a burden.

Filed under  //   comedy   social commentary  
Posted November 30, 2008
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A Poet's Recovery

Facts & Arguments Podcast

I was engaging in a dubious art form that has no audience. Only publication would help me kick the habit

via Globe and Mail

As a teen, I had a dark secret. One hidden from relatives, friends, even my diary.

When there were rumours of another kid engaged in the same activity, I would shake my head and divert suspicion by snickering loudly. It would be years before I confessed: I wrote poetry.

As it turns out, I wasn't alone. Many Canadians have been afflicted with this condition. For most, it clears up before something gets published. Others are not so fortunate.

It is, after all, a complete waste of time that's distinguished by the fact that it has no audience, at least in this country. The only people who attend poetry readings are dutiful friends, perplexed relatives and sometimes other poets looking for assurance their work is better.

At the launch of my first book, there was no one I didn't recognize. At the launch of my second, there actually were. After a flicker of excitement, I realized that was only because a book of 100 poems about the numbers from 1 to 100 was so idiosyncratically perverse, it had drawn the curious.

If the Canada Council for the Arts was serious about supporting this dubious art form, it would stop funding poets. Being addicted, they will write poetry anyway. The money should be used to subsidize people to attend readings and create what poetry really needs: an audience.

My most serious attempt at kicking the habit occurred in my early 20s. I was working on a master's degree in astronomy — a bad choice, it turns out, since it's the most dangerously poetic of the sciences. I would frequently catch myself doodling couplets between the nuclear reaction equations of stellar interiors.

I wanted to stop but nothing worked. So I decided to try the harm-reduction approach and switched to something less damaging.

I chose the novel. There are many examples in Canada of poets breaking their addiction by turning to fiction — and becoming well-known in the process. Some even made money.

For a while it appeared that might work. My novel, Before the Flood, did relatively well, and even snatched a Books in Canada First Novel Award. A recovering poet now, I began a follow-up novel. It looked as if I had finally shaken the metrical monkey off my back.

But one afternoon, lulled by good weather, I dropped my guard and slipped into a bookstore unaccompanied. Sunlight through the stained-glass windows glistened on the newly waxed floor of the poetry section. Chamber music floated from the speakers. The pages of an opened book rustled seductively on an otherwise vacant armchair.

Like the alcoholic who thinks he can handle one drink, I picked up the book and sat. It was a collection of sonnets by a writer whose approach was to start on unpromising turf, inhale deeply and go like mad for 14 lines. I was especially drawn to the use of couplets in place of the eight- and six-line clots of the hardcore sonnet.

The couplets reminded me of what I had written to upholster those astrophysical equations. I began to compose my own 14-liners that usually had astronomical themes. It appeared my affliction, only in remission, had metastasized into a full-blown obsession with the celestial sonnet.

Still, I kept trying. I would lock the unfinished manuscript in a drawer for months at a time. I would refuse to read anything not in paragraphs. I boycotted bookstores. But my idea, like the universe, kept expanding. It became a plan for a sequence of 88 sonnets, each based on one of the 88 constellations.

Distressed, overwhelmed, resigned to my fate, I joined a university writing group. The experience was more like AA meetings adjourned to the pub, where confessions and drunken suggestions poured out.

Fuelled, in part, by the boozy opinion a book like mine needed doing, I continued. Academic poets come from the humanities, never the sciences, and write for each other. Personal poets tend to mine their own angst, which requires more digging inward than looking up. So the cosmos, as subject and imagery source, was largely untapped.

I couldn't ignore that the shape of the sonnet made it the perfect craft from which to explore. I even anchored each sonnet to a star diagram printed by the title like a fingerprint. This way the reader (should there be one) would know every constellation is legitimate and not some private hallucination.

Sky Atlas is finished now, published, out of my system. My physician has pronounced me poetry-free. I've gained weight, thrown out every book not written in prose and changed my e-mail address so workshop friends can't contact me. I've re-entered a monogamous relationship with my next novel. If ever again, on a slow afternoon, I find myself in the perilous vicinity of a poetry aisle, I'm sure I'll walk right by.

Alan R. Wilson lives in Victoria.

Illustration by Jason Logan.

 

  
(download)

Filed under  //   comedy   podcast   poetry  
Posted November 24, 2008
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NEA Funds Construction of $1.3 Billion Poem

WASHINGTON—The National Endowment for the Arts announced Monday that it has begun construction on a $1.3 billion, 14-line lyric poem—its largest investment in the nation's aesthetic- industrial complex since the $850 million interpretive-dance budget of 1985.

"America's metaphors have become strained beyond recognition, our nation's verses are severely overwrought, and if one merely examines the internal logic of some of these archaic poems, they are in danger of completely falling apart," said the project's head stanza foreman Dana Gioia. "We need to make sure America's poems remain the biggest, best-designed, best-funded poems in the world."

Gioia confirmed that the public-works composition will be assembled letter-by-letter atop a solid base of the relationship between man and nature. The poem's structure, laid out extensively on lined-paper blueprints, involves a traditional three- quatrain-and-a-couplet framework, which will be tethered to an iambic meter for increased stability and symmetry. If the planners can secure an additional $6.2 million in funding, they may affix a long dash to the end of line three, though Gioia said that is a purely optimistic projection at this stage.

The poem is expected not only to revitalize the community, Gioia said, but also create jobs for the nation's hundreds of out-of-work poets. According to the proposed budget, the poem's 224 authors have allocated $4 million for the final rhyming couplet, $52 million to insert hyphens into the word "tomorrow" so it reads "to-morrow," $7.45 for a used copy of John Keats' Selected Poems for ideas and inspiration, and $450 million for a simile likening human fate to the wind.

Some experts, however, say the poem is already at risk of going over budget, citing the soaring $5,000-per-square-inch cost of vellum, and an ambitious but perhaps ill-conceived $135 million undertaking to make the word "owl" rhyme with "soul."

"We've already put 200 hours of manpower into the semicolon at the end of the first stanza," said Charles Simic, poet laureate of the United States and head author of the still- untitled piece. "And I've got my best guys working around the clock to convert all the 'overs' in the piece into one-syllable 'o'ers.' I got [Nobel Prize winner Seamus] Heaney and [Margaret] Atwood stripping all the V's and tacking apostrophes in their place. It's grunt work, but somebody's got to do it if this poem's going to get done."

Gioia denied allegations that the poem is being mismanaged, claiming that he has implemented several measures to keep the project on schedule, including giving no more than two words to each poet, limiting alliteration and assonance to a maximum of three words per line, cutting out all extraneous allusions to Eliot and Yeats, and restricting any unwieldy metaphors hinting at the vast alienation of modernity.

Although the poem is still in the early stages of construction, it has already come under fire for serious structural issues, including a shaky foundation and a half-dozen partial synecdoches.

"This poem is an eyesore," said literary critic Stanley Fish. "The whole right side of the verse is barely being held up by a load-bearing enjambment, and it seems as if they just sloppily patched up all the holes in the piece with plagiarized Rod McKuen passages."

In addition, the tenuous line that was being drawn between the narrator's mortality and winter unexpectedly collapsed on itself Monday. Two poets were killed in the incident.

"Sure, some of the imagery might be beautiful, but is this poem actually going to be useful?" Fish said. "Or are people just going to look at it and go, 'Huh. Interesting.' Why not put this money toward something everybody can enjoy, like a TV pilot or a New Yorker cartoon caption?"

"The government needs to stop throwing billions of dollars at the arts," he added.

Fish cautioned that previous attempts to funnel money into poetry had been cut short before they were fully completed, resulting in the large number of unfinished, million-dollar poems that are still lying unread across the country to this day.

via The Onion

Filed under  //   comedy   poetry  
Posted September 20, 2008
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Patton's Graduation Speech


First off, I want to thank the teachers and faculty of Broad Run High School for first considering and then inviting me to speak here.   It was flattering, I am touched and humbled, and you have made a grave mistake.

I’m being paid for this, right?   Oh, wait, there’s some advice, right off the bat – always get paid.   If you make enough money in this world you can smoke pot all day and have people killed.

I’m sorry, that was irresponsible.

You shouldn’t have people killed.

Boom!  Marijuana endorsement eleven seconds into my speech! Too late to cancel me now! 

It’s dumb-ass remarks like that which kept me out of the National Honor Society and also made me insanely wealthy.   If I move to Brazil.

I graduated from Broad Run High School 21 years ago.   That means, theoretically, I could be – each and every one of you – your father.    And I’m speaking especially to the black and Asian students.   

So now I’m going to try to give all of you some advice as if I contained fatherly wisdom, which I do not.   I contain mostly caffeine, Cheet-o dust, fear and scotch.

I know most of you worked very hard to get here today but guess what?   The Universe sent you a pasty goblin to welcome you into the world.   Were The Greaseman and Arch Campbell not available?

So, 1987.    That’s when I got my diploma.   But I want to tell you something that happened the week before I graduated.   It was life-changing, it was profound, and it was deeper than I realized at the time.

The week before graduation I strangled a hobo.   Oh wait, that’s a different story.   That was college.   I’m speaking at my college later this month.  I’ve got both speeches here.    Let me sum up the college speech – always have a gallon of bleach in your trunk.

High school.   A week before I graduated high school I had dinner, in Leesburg, with a local banker who was giving me a partial scholarship.  I still don’t understand why.   Maybe he had me confused with another student, someone who hadn’t written his AP English paper on comparisons between Jay Gatsby and Spider-Man.   But, I was getting away with it, and I love money and food, so double win.

And I remember, I’m sitting at this dinner, with a bunch of other kids from the other local high schools.   And I’m trying my pathetic best to look cool and mysterious, because I was 17 and so into the myth of myself.   Remember, this dinner and this scholarship was happening to me.

And I figured this banker guy was a nice guy but hey, I’m the special one at the table.   I had a view of the world, where I was eternally Bill Murray in Stripes.    I’d be the one with the quips and insights at this dinner.   This old man in a suit doesn’t have anything to teach me beyond signing that check.   I’ve got a cool mullet and a skinny leather tie from Chess King.   And check out my crazy suspenders with the piano keys on them.   Have you ever seen Blackadder?   ‘Cuz I’ll recite it.

And then this banker – clean-shaven, grey suit and vest – you’d never look twice at him on the street – he told me about The Five Environments.

He leans forward, near the end of the dinner, and he says to me, “There are Five Environments you can live in on this planet.   There’s The City.   The Desert.   The Mountains.   The Plains.   And The Beach.

You can live in combinations of them.   Maybe a city in the desert, or in the mountains by the ocean.  Or you could choose just one.  Out in the plains somewhere, perhaps.

“But you need to get out there and travel, and figure out where you thrive.  

“Some places you’ll go to and you’ll feel yourself wither.    Your brain will fog up, your body won’t respond to your thoughts and desires, and you’ll feel sad and angry.

“You need to find out which of the Five Environments are yours.   If you belong by the ocean, then the mountains will ruin you.   If you’re suited for the blue solitude of the plains, then the city will be a tight, roaring prison cell that’ll eat you alive. 

He was right.   I’ve traveled and tested his theory and he was absolutely right.   There are Five Environments.   If you find the right combination, or the perfect singularity, your life will click…into…place.   You will click into place.

And I remember, so clearly, driving home from that dinner, how lucky I felt to have met someone who affirmed what I was already planning to do after high school.   I was going to roam and blitz and blaze my way all over the planet.

Anywhere but here.   Anywhere but Northern Virginia.    NoVa.   You know what a “nova” is?   It’s when a white dwarf star gobbles up so much hydrogen from a neighboring star it causes a cataclysmic nuclear explosion.   A cosmic event.   

Well, I was a white dwarf and I was definitely doing my share of gobbling up material.    But I didn’t feel like any events in my life were cosmic.   The “nova” I lived in was a rural coma sprinkled with chunks of strip mall numbness.    I had two stable, loving parents, a sane and wise little brother and I was living in Sugarland Run, whose motto is, “Ooooh!   A bee!    Shut the door!”

I wanted to explode.   I devoured books and movies and music and anything that would kick open windows to other worlds real or imagined.   Sugarland Run, and Sterling and Ashburn and Northern Virginia were, for me, a sprawling batter’s box before real experience began.

And I followed that banker’s advice.   I had to get college out of the way but once I got my paper I lit out hard.

Oh this world.   Ladies and gentlemen, this world rocks and it never lets up.

I’ve seen endless daylight and darkness in Alaska.   I’ve swum in volcanic craters in Hawaii and saw the mystical green flash when the sun sinks behind the Pacific.   I got ripped on absinthe in Prague and watched the sun rise over the synagogue where the Golem is supposedly locked in the attic.   I stood under the creepy shadow of Christchurch Spitafields, in London’s East End, and sank a pint next door at The Ten Bells, where two of Jack the Ripper’s victims were last seen drinking.   I’ve fed gulls at the harbor in Galway, Ireland.   I’ve done impromptu Bloomsday tours of Dublin.

I cried my eyes out on the third floor of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, all those paintings that Vincent and his circle have to each other as gifts because they were all broke some cold Christmas long ago.  I’ve eaten crocodile in the Laneways of Melbourne Australia and ortolans on the Left Bank of Paris, France.

I’ve been to Canada.

I’ve been to every state in this country.   I’ve been to hidden, subterranean restaurants in New York with the guys from Anthrax and eaten at L.A. taquieras with “Weird” Al Yankovic.   I held the guitar that Hendrix torched at Monterey Pop and watched Woodstock ’99 burn to the ground.   I’ve lingered at the corner of Bush and Stockton in San Francisco where Miles Archer took a bullet in The Maltese Falcon, and brooded over the grave of H.P. Lovecraft in Providence, R.I.    I’ve hung out with Donny Osmond and Jim Goad, Suge Knight and Aimee Mann, Bill Hicks and Don Rickles.

I’ve done stand-up comedy in laundromats, soup kitchens and frat houses, and onstage at Lollapalooza and Coachella.   I’ve toured with bands, been to the Oscars and the Superbowl, and been killed in movies by vampires, forest fires and air-to-air missiles.

And I missed the banker’s lesson.   100%, I completely missed it.

In my defense, he didn’t even know he was teaching it.

Telling me about the 5 Environments and urging me to travel?   That was advice.    It wasn’t a lesson.   Advice is everywhere in this world.   Your friends, family, teachers and strangers are all happy to give it.

A lesson is yours and yours alone.   Some of them take years to recognize and utilize. 

My lesson was this – experience, and reward and glory are meaningless unless you’re open and present with the people you share them with in the moment. 

Let me go back to that dinner, 21 years ago.   There I was, shut off from this wise, amazing old man.   Then he zaps me with one of the top 5 pieces of information I’ve ever received in this life, and all I was thankful for was how it benefited me.

I completely ignored the deeper lesson which is do not judge, and get outside yourself, and realize that everyone and everything has its own story, and something to teach you, and that they’re also trying – consciously or unconsciously – to learn and grow from you and everything else around them.   And they’re trying with the same passion and hunger and confusion that I was feeling – no matter where they were in their lives, no matter how old or how young.

I’m not saying that you guys shouldn’t go out there and see and do everything there is to see and do.   Go.   As fast as you can.    I don’t know how much longer this world has got, to be honest.

All of you have been given a harsh gift.  It’s the same gift the graduating class of 1917, and 1938, and 1968 and now you guys got – the chance to enter adulthood when the world teeters on the rim of the sphincter of oblivion.    You’re jumping into the deep end.   You have no choice but to be exceptional.

But please don’t mistake miles traveled, and money earned, and fame accumulated for who you are.   

Because now I understand how the miraculous, horrifying and memorable lurk everywhere.    But they’re hidden to the kind of person I was when I graduated high school.   And now – and it’s because of my traveling and living and some pretty profound mistakes along the way – they’re all laid open to me.   They’re mine for the feasting.    In the Sistine Chapel and in a Taco Bell.   In Bach’s Goldberg Variations and in the half-heard brain dead chatter of a woman on her cell phone behind me on an airplane. In Baghdad, Berlin and Sterling, Virginia. 

I think now about the amazing thunderstorms in the summer evenings.   And how – late at night, during a blizzard, you can stand outside and hear the collective, thumping murmur of a million snowflakes hitting the earth, like you’re inside a sleeping god’s thoughts.  

I think of the zombie movies I shot back in the gnarled, grey woods and the sad, suburban punks I waited on at Waxie Maxie’s.   I think of the disastrous redneck weddings I deejay’d for when I was working for Sounds Unlimited and the Lego spaceships my friends and I would build after seeing Star Wars.    

I think about my dad, and how he consoled me when I’d first moved to L.A. and called him, saying I was going into therapy for depression, and how ashamed I was.  And he laughed and said, “What the hell’s to be ashamed of?”  And I said, “Man, you got your leg machine-gunned in Vietnam.  You never went to therapy.  Humphrey Bogart never went to therapy.”  And my dad said, “Yeah, but Bogie smoked three cartons of cigarettes a day.”   And how my mom came down to the kitchen when I was studying for my trig final, at 2 o’clock in the morning, and said, “Haven’t you already been accepted to college?”  And I said, “Yeah, but this test is really going to be hard.”  And she asked, “What’s the test for again?”  And I said, “Calculus” and she closed my notebook and said, “You’ll never use this.  Ever.  Go to bed or watch a movie.”   And how when I got my first ever acting gig, on Seinfeld, my brother sent me a postcard of Minnie Pearl, and he wrote on it, “Never forget, you and her are in the same profession.”

I didn’t realize how all of these places and people and events were just as crucial in shaping me as anything I roamed to the corners of the Earth to see.   And they’ve shaped you, and will shape you, whether you realize it now or later.   All of you are richer and wiser than you know. 

So I will leave you with some final advice.   You’ll decide later if this was a lesson.   And if you realize there was no lesson in any of this, then that was a lesson.  

But I’d like all of you to enter this world, and your exploration of the Five Environments, better armed then I was.   And without a mullet.   Which I see you’re all way ahead of me on.

First off:  Reputation, Posterity and Cool are traps.   They’ll drain the life from your life.   Reputation, Posterity and Cool = Fear.  

Let me put that another way.   Bob Hope once said, “When I was twenty, I worried what everything thought of me.    When I turned forty, I didn’t care what anyone thought of me.   And then I made it to sixty, and I realized no one was ever thinking of me.”    And then he pooed his pants, but that didn’t make what he said any less profound.

Secondly:   The path is made by walking.    And when you’re walking that path, you choose how things affect you.  You always have that freedom, no matter how much your liberty it curtailed.   You…get to choose…how things affect you.

And lastly, and I guarantee this.   It’s the one thing I know ‘cause I’ve experienced it:

There Is No Them.   

I’m going to get out of your way now.    Get out there.   Let’s see which one of you is up here in twenty years.    If you’re lacking confidence, remember – I wouldn’t have picked me.

{Patton Oswalt}

Filed under  //   comedy  
Posted August 19, 2008
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Last Call: Comedy

Final week: Mitch Hedberg, Bill Hicks No.2, The Dude, Bill Murray No.1, Andy Kaufman No.2, J.J. Walker Order here.

Filed under  //   comedy   reckon  
Posted June 29, 2008
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