Tag: writers

Pushers & Pseudo-Philosophers

Imagine that you’re a heroin addict. It’s probably a bizarre thought, but just bear with me for a moment. Imagine that right now you’re not sitting over an illuminated screen reading the words of a frustrated writer. But rather you’re turning tricks on a street corner trying to earn a couple of bucks to chase down your next score. You’re entire being aches for another hit; your head is pounding and your stomach feels like it’s tearing itself in two at your unintentional starvation of that needle full of cooked rock that you so desperately crave. You’d do pretty much anything for the opportunity to shoot strings of happiness into your veins and after a few hours of lifting wallets from unsuspecting victims you’ve amassed enough cash to buy a little rock, so you hotfoot it over to your local dealers house.

The place is a fucking dive. If you were to try and take a shit and mould a house out of it you’re pretty sure it would look better than this. But you’re not here to admire the décor. You’re here to tap that vein in the crook of your elbow until it bulges and you can slip a needle full of H into it. There’s only one problem. It’s not your vein that’s tapped out. It’s your dealer. He’s run dry and you’re left staring at some useless piece of shit who can’t satisfy your needs. But he likes you. You’ve been a steady client for years so he gives you two options. There’s a pusher down town who has some of the best shit in the district. Only problem is it’s double the price of what you’d usually pay for a hit. Otherwise there’s a halfwit kid peddling a cut up version of the drug you crave around the corner. He’s known for his shitty wares that are usually spliced with a little washing powder or battery acid but with the money in your pocket you’d probably walk away from the deal with a hit and some change.

So what do you do? Do you feed yourself the watered down shit that may potentially kill you and will have you leaving unsatisfied? Or do you start turning tricks again to double your money and go score some quality shit when you can afford it? It seems obvious that if you were a heroin addict you’d try to double your money and hunt down the drug that isn’t going to leave your needs unsatisfied and potentially kill you. Yet when we trade out that heroin addiction for an admittedly less dangerous infatuation with literature we seem so ready to take a gamble and consume the watered down trash rather than track down better quality shit.

See I’m a Pusher. I’m that guy down town who’s peddling wares that are a little harder to come by but are admittedly of a far better grade than the halfwit trying to compete with me. But unlike a regular pusher you won’t find me standing in a back alley surrounded by hired muscle peddling high grade heroin onto junkies. Instead you’ll find me threaded throughout the online community of WordPress surrounded by pop-up ads and other pushers peddling my own inner thoughts onto you, my ever faithful literature junkie. See you’re not here because you want to shoot strings of happiness up your arm; you’re here because you want to fire strings of carefully woven phrases into your mind. It’s that desire to feel intellectually satisfied that keeps you returning to this blog and many just like it. You crave knowledge and perspectives and know that there is no better way to satisfy these urges than to open your mind to the world of literature.

But there’s a plight now facing the new wave of emerging literature junkies that are just starting to venture out of their comfort zones to track down the substances they so desperately need. The halfwit pseudo-philosopher masking himself as a pusher and peddling his cheap, poor quality shit onto the unsuspecting and the unaware. Bullshit stories on social media sites that play on human emotion are the new players on the scene in the writing world. They are shit quality, totally fictitious and often poorly written, but they focus on a simple formula that affords them widespread circulation: create some heart-wrenching story of human triumph and the baser human emotion of the reader’s compassion will do the rest.

But it doesn’t stop there. See that’s just phase one of the pseudo-philosopher’s cutting of the product. The tear-jerking stories are the washing powder. The battery acid comes in the form of the woefully uneducated trying to emulate the washing powder tales for themselves. We live in a world where everyone has a voice, which is great. But if you’re not a writer don’t try and pass yourself off as one. If you’re not a philosopher then stop trying to create insightful status updates or posts that are rife with poor spelling and grammatical construction. You’re battery acid is diluting the better quality shit for sale down town.

So now you’re educated. But you’re still a junkie and your dealer has nothing to offer you. So you need to make a call. You’ve got a pocket full of collateral earned from turning tricks on the corner. But this isn’t any ordinary collateral. You haven’t got a surplus of cash at your disposal, but rather time. You’ve got an intellectual itch that needs to be scratched and you’ve got just two options; keep turning tricks and chew up some time hunting down that elusive high quality pusher. Or start swallowing down the diluted shit readily available at every click of the mouse and risk an infuriating rush of blood to the head as the lesser quality product leaves you nauseous with disgust at its lack of originality and skill.

So what are you going to do? Well, just by reading this blog you’ve chosen the road that is unfortunately a lot less travelled. You’re hunting down pushers plugging a product they give a shit about and turning away from easier option of the pseudo-philosophers. There’s no reward for this. You’re still a literature junkie and you’ll forever have a need to be satisfied through the phrases of others. But by choosing your pushers wisely you’ll actually have moments where those urges of yours are actually sated. Moments when you can sit back in your lounge chair and close your eyes thrilled by the knowledge that a writer has opened up their heart and mind and found a place within yours.

Authors note: If you were to take ten writers (and I use the term loosely) at random and put them together in a room and dissect them, your break down would more than likely consist of this:

o 1 dealer (A writer who has cracked the big time)
o 2 Pushers plugging their wares in writer’s circles
o 7 Pseudo-philosophers who are standing around with nothing of value to contribute yet oddly preaching their worth to anyone within reach.

Literature is a drug. And like any drug, great literature is hard to find. But believe me when I say that it does exist, you’ve just got to be willing to spend the collateral to acquire it. So spread the word: pseudo-philosophers are on the way out, the rise of the pushers is here. We’re taking our wares to the digital street corners of the web, giving junkies everywhere a buzz that no halfwit piece of shit script or writer will ever be able to emulate.

Monsters

‘We stopped checking for monsters under our beds when we realised they were inside us.’
-Sam Steven

Confession time: I’ve been on a bit of a downward spiral as of late. Ever since my last post I’ve been struggling to find the urge to even turn my laptop on each day, let alone write something worth reading. In fact I could probably count the amount of times I’ve actually written anything on one hand, and the most I ever managed to produce in one sitting was about two hundred and fifty words. That, my dear reader, is hardly the way to go about finishing one of the multitudes of manuscripts currently sitting half-finished on my hard drive.

So why this complete lack of willpower to create? Why after coming so far with my craft of the past year and a half have I suddenly taken such a momentous step backward leaving me hopelessly floundering through a period of self-loathing? The truth is that it could be any number of things; or more likely it’s a combination of a few influences that has me suddenly apathetic about pretty much everything once again. There’s the medical scare that my partner underwent recently, plus the whole Christmas/end of year wind down that sees just about everybody making excuses for their laziness. Then there’s work matters, family issues, financial deadlines, and just about anything else you can think of that is currently plaguing my mind and literally killing off my desire to write.

These issues are my monsters. They are the things that once lived under the bed and occupied but a fraction of my time as I quickly checked that they were being held at bay before I resumed my everyday life. But somehow, somewhere, the monsters managed to crawl from underneath their shadowy caves and find themselves a home anew inside of my heart and mind. At some point I stopped needing to check for the monsters underneath my bed because they were already inside my head, and they were already fucking shit up.

One of the greatest issues that I have with being a writer is the sole crushing thoughts that usually accompany an overactive mind. I can deal with the loneliness. I can deal with the ridicule of manuscripts shunned, or even the distain of the fucking mouth breathers of the world that assume you are weird or different because you have the intellectual capacity to articulate yourself. But sometimes I really struggle with the monsters of my own mind that constantly over analyse everything. Sometimes I just wish I could step back and take something at face value rather than analysing it until I am certain that understand every minute detail of it. Sometimes I just wish I didn’t feel the need to question everything.

-But this isn’t a negative post. No. This is in fact a therapeutic addition to my ever burgeoning catalogue of thoughts. For you see, one of my greatest joys as a writer is that I do question everything. I love that I’m not willing to accept the world at face value, or that I wish to see more than one horizon in my future. All I am saying is that when times get tough and those monsters that once inspired you to create decide to turn on you instead… Well, you’re kind of fucked.

Right now I’m in that place. That frame of mind where I need to distance myself from my writing and I need to seek out the monsters of my mind and drag them back into the shadows underneath my bed where they belong. It sounds easy enough on paper; and the truth is that it is. The truth is that right now there are people all around the world facing situations that make anything I have ever dealt with feel like a fucking farce. And they are doing so with more gusto and determination that I am. These people are taking to their own monsters with blades held at the ready while I’m wallowing around in self-pity as mine eat my mind from within. I know that I can overcome them. We all can. But we actually have to want to. And up until this post I just haven’t even cared to try.

So, without further ado, here’s to the ensuing battle to come. Here’s to kicking the monsters of my mind in the teeth and dragging them back to the dusty shitholes where they belong. Here’s to me standing up and taking control of my passions once more. And more importantly, here’s to you my humble reader, for finding the courage to do the same.

The Writer & the Fighter

Sometimes this thing we call life can be a real fuck of a thing. We as humans can move from moments of pure elation to moments of sheer terror and uncertainty in an instant and our whole lives can turn on a dime. We travel through life as though we are racing towards something important; some kind of elusive goal that is always just out of our reach, and we rarely ever stop to live in the moment and realise just how lucky we are to be alive. By living in the moment I don’t mean going out dancing in a night club or curling next to your significant other underneath a blanket. Those things are great, don’t get me wrong. But I mean truly living in the moment and understanding just how wonderful it is to be who we are, where we are, and who we are with. Continue reading “The Writer & the Fighter”

Keeping it Simple

Anyone who has ever studied any form of writing, business or design has probably heard of a little thing called the KISS principle. If you haven’t then there is a fair chance that you’re either not taking your studies seriously, or you’ve plain forgotten about this little pearl of wisdom. KISS is a rather simple acronym that stands for Keep It Simple Stupid and was principally noted by the US Navy in the 1960’s. The principle is easy to understand – the name basically says it all; most systems work best if they are simplistic in nature and avoid unnecessary complications.

Originally coined by a lead engineer at the Lockheed Skunk Works, the principle stemmed from the idea that engineers need to construct a jet aircraft that could be fixed with the limited tools available to the average mechanic operating within the field of combat. The system in question was the maintenance and repair of a piece of machinery responsible for air to air combat; however the idea is so easily relatable to many other areas in life – including writing.

When a writer creates a piece it must be two things: original and relatable (or at the very least understandable). Often times an ill-experienced writer (yours truly sometimes included) tends to focus on mastering one of these two integral components instead of both; which in turn produces a project that feels incomplete, unbalanced, or for lack of a better word – shit. Evidence of this is clearly evident in our everyday consumption of media through the mediums of both spoken and written word, however it is possible to find success creating a piece that lacks originality yet is highly understandable and still become successful.

If you don’t believe me then go spark up the wireless and take a listen to the god-awful tracks from artists like Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, or One Direction that run on high rotation. These artists often produce tracks or ‘systems’ that are simplistic yet totally unoriginal. Their so called writers (aka marketing teams) produce lyrics that carry no real weight, yet are so easily relatable that they can be effortlessly interpreted within the minds of the masses. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look: Katy Perry recently released a song where she warbles:

You held me down, but I got up; already brushing off the dust.

But who held her down? And why did they? They must have been a real arsehole to do that to her. Was Katy being physically abused? That’s absurd! Why didn’t anybody help her?…Or is it a metaphor? Was she was trapped underneath a glass ceiling within the music industry? Surely not! Or was someone trying to supress her in another manner? The point is that no one really knows just who the fuck pissed off Katy to the point where she grew the heart of a fighter, and the point is that it doesn’t matter. Her lyrics are so vague and unoriginal that everyone from a scorned employee or lover, through to a ten year old girl can take those lyrics and find their own story within them. Katy keeps it simple, and as such even someone with the limited mental capacity or ‘tools’ that a ten year old possesses can understand her message.

But what happens when a writer creates an ill balanced piece that focuses too heavily on originality that it fails to pay any courtesy to the works ability to be palatable and relatable to the masses? Sadly that also happens every day, and as an aspiring author who devours the works of other up and coming artists on a regular basis, I see it all too often. Writers become so concerned with creating original pieces that they throw caution to the wind, dust off the thesaurus and unload with a string of unnecessary adverbs and adjectives that take a potentially beautiful piece of work and leave it feeling disjointed and almost impossible to digest.

Manuscripts like this simply don’t work; you can quote me on that. I’ve sat in university tutorials and listened to others ramble for almost three pages about how a character looks, or describe in every minute detail the room in which said character finds themselves standing. Their work reads like a fucking who’s-who of describing words and labels; if we were being marked on word counts I’m sure they’d win some kind of commendation for their stellar efforts. They mistake clutter for originality and over saturate a scene or script until it becomes indecipherable and the actual purpose of the work is lost in an unmelodiousness mess of descriptions.

I truly believe that the best piece of advice I have ever received as a writer came in my first semester of university almost three years ago now. My lecturer was reviewing the works of our class after an assessment, providing a little generalised feedback to the congregation as a whole when she stopped and put down her notes.

‘Many of you have written wonderful descriptions of characters and plot-lines only to run out of space within the confines of the word limit provided before your story ever really began,’ she said with a grin. ‘From now on I want you all to do one thing: Just fucking write what happens.’

Her little rant still sits in the back of my mind every single time I write, or even when I consume the works of others. We as writers often need to remind ourselves of the KISS principle in order to keep ourselves in check and ensure that our work is both creative and palatable to others. Originality is paramount to feeling fulfilled as a writer, yet it can so easily become lost within a maze of descriptions and passive writing. We must keep it simple and create works that we ourselves would love to sit down and read. If you proof your own writing and think holy shit that sounds wordy, then chances are that your audience isn’t going to have the faintest fucking clue as to what you are trying to say.

Bench Players & Flowerbeds

As an aspiring author there are times when it feels as though you’re sitting on a bench in a school yard with your peers watching as the cool kids stand in front of everyone and pick teams for a game of hoops. You sit patiently with your hands in your lap, knowing that you’re all but a sure thing for an early pick. Everyone knows that you can play with the best of them. Sure there are people on the bench who can steal or block better than you, some can even hit a three pointer over a defender better than you can. But you’re consistent; you work hard, and are a solid all round performer who on any given day can showcase a stellar effort of skill, and most importantly, determination.

The cool kids start picking teams, you’re not their first choice but that’s alright. You don’t mind if someone else nabs the coveted number one pick, as long as you are eventually recognised for your talents. But the picks keep coming and the decent players all take sides and you suddenly find yourself seated on the bench with a bunch of ballers that aren’t fit to step on the same court as you. Ok you think. Here it comes, there’s no way that I won’t be chosen next. All that hard work you’ve put in honing your skills are about to be rewarded. The next pick comes, but it’s not you. It’s one of the fucking desperados sitting beside you; a guy that you know you can run rings around on a bad day. The move blindsides you. What the fuck just happened? What could possibly compel someone to bypass you when you are clearly the most deserving? Then the picks keep rolling and suddenly you’re sitting alone staring up at a team you really deserved to be a part of wondering what the hell went wrong.

Writing is often a harrowingly lonely process that is seldom filled with the kind of human interaction that our species so feverishly craves. As an aspiring author you spend hours honing your crafts, pouring through novels or text books, devouring poems, films, music and manuscripts as though watching the playoff performances of your opponents. You admire and you aspire, but at the same time a yearning to better them at their own game fuels a hunger inside of you that sees pens scrawl in frantic cursive across notebook pages or fingers tap relentlessly against keys. You learn everything there is to learn, you find faults in your craft through your constant examination, and work harder at perfecting what you do until you know that if you were given the shot, given the opportunity to enter your own playoff game, you’d blitz the competition and leave behind a legacy that will outlive you.

But still you find yourself stuck on that fucking bench. It seems like no matter what those cool kids calling the shots just won’t put you in the starting line-up. You’re the best damn writer there is and some fucking shmuck in a suit whose job it is to make or break an artist won’t take a gamble on you because there’s something different about you. There’s an unfamiliar element to your game that he fears to throw his support behind no matter how much his gut tells him that you’ll succeed. Your writing is different, brutal, unpolished, offensive, or not marketable. That’s not to say that it’s not good, but it just doesn’t fit inside the preconceived idea of what he is after. So instead of choosing you for his team and giving you the opportunity to run those assists or hit those deep three pointers, he chooses a safer option with less talent. Publishers and the cool kids are often terrified of the unpredictable or the truly unique, so they ridicule or overlook, passing up the opportunity to inspire greatness.

In this dilemma of the aspiring writer/baller lies a rather pressing question. Do I sell out and play it safe? Do I create a manuscript or a set play that lacks all real creativity and is devoid of any of the intricacies that make me who I am in order to be pulled off of the bench and into the starting line up? Or do I continue to be myself. Do I make the plays or the manuscripts that the team and the publishing industry don’t necessarily want, but that they truly need and deserve?

During my lifespan as an aspiring writer I have met many others just like me vying for the same ultimate dream of seeing their work in print. And in my time I’ve noticed that some of the greatest writers that I have met have been the ones most ridiculed or ignored by their peers. Oftentimes these men and women create pieces that are so beautifully unique that many fail to comprehend just how incredible they actually are, and although the author truly deserves to find recognition for what they have created they ultimately fail where others with lesser talent but larger lungs succeed.

I used to get upset when this happened. I’d kick and scream and tear my fucking hair out that someone so undeserving could be given an opportunity when another so talented could be left begging. But lately I’ve been thinking of the publishing industry in a different light. Maybe it’s not like a game of hoops at all. Maybe instead this whole crazy industry is more like a flowerbed. The cool kids are actually gardeners and the reason that they are picking other author’s over me (or anyone else truly deserving of success) is that they need to line the bed with a nice thick layer of shit before anything of substance has a chance to grow.

Behaviorism

mind
So it turns out that this blog, like many others just like it may actually be hindering rather than helping me on my crusade to become a published author. I started this blog a long time ago to overcome a few negative influences on my life and through outlining my problems I managed to triumph over the depression that was clinging to my heart and mind and become the man that I am today. Yet over time the purpose behind my posts moved away from overcoming the past and I set my sights towards the future.

I started to blog about my desire to become a published author and outlined the hurdles that stood in the way of my success. And when I did I felt great. With each successive view of my works by my followers or passer-by’s that stumbled across my site I felt a growing sense of success welling within me. I felt great when someone took the time out of their life to view my work and in that sense of elation lurked a hidden danger that could very nearly have derailed my journey to success.

I’m a TED fan. I enjoy watching videos of some of the world’s greatest minds as they stand before a congregation of their peers and share their research, their theories and themselves. Often times the talks I watch bare no direct correlation to my own life; I don’t have the capacity to see beyond the limitations of my own world, but I do enjoy watching others broaden my horizons ever so slightly. Yet every now and then a talk’s message will resonate deep within me and have me re-examining my writing, my actions, and my world.

Today I watched a talk by one of my favourite presenters: Derek Sivers. During the incredibly brief talk Sivers completely debunked conventional wisdom that sees us sharing our goals and ambitions with others – Just as I do on the pages of this blog. Sivers through the studies of social psychology’s founder Kurt Lewin (and subsequent theorists since) posited that through having another acknowledge your goals it created a social reality that tricked the mind into feeling as though the hard work required to achieve said goal was already done. But what the fuck does that even mean?

It means that when we experience the affirmation of our peers just for stating our goals we are less likely to actually follow through and actually achieve.

Take me for example. Every time I post a new entry I receive an influx of viewers to my site. They all read my works, and some choose to like a post or even send me a private message to tell me as much. When this happens it feels great. I feel as though I am succeeding and that my dreams of becoming a published author are within reach. But then after that sense of elation and success comes a dangerous slump; I get lazy. I become convinced that I’m getting closer to my dreams and can almost taste the success and further affirmation of my peers. I’ll receive a bunch of emails as testament of my small following growing in numbers and I’ll tell myself that rather than waking at the crack of dawn the following morning to write, I deserve to sleep in and give it a miss for a day or two.

But do I really deserve to take a break? Have I really achieved anything? Or is the mere affirmation of my goals by my peers creating a damaging behaviorism that if left unchecked will become the downfall of all my hard work? And if so, then how do I overcome it? Well, like any affliction the first step to overcoming is accepting. By accepting that I am allowing myself to fall into such a destructive thought pattern I can effectively neutralise the effects by making a conscious decision not to allow myself to feel accomplished through affirmation. That’s not to say that from now on I’m going to be a joyless prick, but rather I’m going to be acutely aware of the effects that positive reinforcement has on my craft.

Complacency has no place on the path to success. So with that being said I’ll be making sure that I set my alarm for tomorrow morning and wake up extra early to start pouring my mind out onto pages once again.

Singularity

Universe
Sometimes in life no matter how pure our intentions, or how significant our compulsions, we still manage to lose track of who we really are and what we are trying to achieve. Sometimes we become so concerned with what we are doing that we fail to recognise or pay homage to why the fuck we are even doing it in the first place. It’s a phenomenon as old as man himself. We take ourselves and our talents for granted, and often something we love, or something we aspire to, becomes a monotonous or menial aspect of our lives that we derive little enjoyment from. Continue reading “Singularity”

Wanderlust

gothere
Ever since I stumbled upon New York Hardcore outfit Every Time I Die’s 2009 album The New Junk Aesthetic I’ve been in love with the word Wanderlust. As a writer it’s not uncommon to fall in love with a word, phrase, or quote; my iPhone, laptop and notebooks are full of various screenshots and scribbles of words that inspire me to create. Yet few have ever managed to illicit the kind of reaction that the title of track four on the aforementioned album does. Wanderlust: Just the way it rolls off of your tongue ignites this writer’s desire to create. But what does it mean? Well, to summarise about a million different dictionaries and websites, a state of wanderlust is:

A strong desire for or impulse to wander or travel and explore the world.

Even its meaning gives me goose-bumps, and yet seems so inherently simple to grasp. A strong desire to explore the world: wanderlust is that impulse we feel to travel. It’s that compulsion that tells us to save up our pennies and jump on a plane, train or bus and venture to areas a new so that we may increase our awareness of the world around us. That impulse; that urge to travel is what has led me to be sitting on a deck chair in Thailand as I pen this very entry. My own desire to explore has seen me travel across boarders from my humble home in Brisbane, Australia to a world vastly different from where I live.

It seems so straight forward, doesn’t it? If one experiences a sense of wanderlust then they feel an urge to travel and explore the physical realms of this world. We commonly refer to this sensation as the travel bug, but what if there is more to it than that? What if this form of the sensation is merely skin deep? What if there are two levels of wanderlust that we can feel? Surely if this were to be the case than what I have just described could only be defined as feeling the emotion on a macrocosm level. My desires to travel to Thailand are universal; everyone at some point in their life is exposed to that unrelenting urge to travel, or to start afresh in a new or foreign place. It’s this feeling that inspires us to broaden our horizons. But there is so much more to our world than just the physical and the tangible.

Part of my journey overseas was to satisfy this feeling of wanderlust and itchy feet that has been growing inside of me since my last international journey. But for the larger part my journey has been sparked by a yearning to overcome the angst within the microcosm that is my heart and my mind. Confusing right? Well, let me simplify it for you: I’ve travelled overseas not so I can explore the world, but rather so that I can explore my own mind. I’ve taken a journey through the macrocosm of our globe so that I can better understand the microcosm that is me.

For as long as I can remember my heart and mind has been a volatile mixture of pure love and unrelenting hate for everyone and everything around me. If you’ve ever had the (dis)pleasure of meeting me, you will be acutely aware that I am quite a placid person. There is very little that seems to faze me on the macrocosm level. I try each and every single day to only expose my positivity to the world; yet internally there are fires raging that if ever unleashed would turn so much of what I love to ashes. My microcosm is a fucking nightmarish world of pent up creativity and frustration at a world that refuses to take my craft as seriously as I do. Most days my aspirations of becoming a published author are stifled by the mundane tasks of a man failing to live up to his dreams. I live in this bizarre world where I project a positivity onto others that I fail to project internally to myself. Shit, if you asked me to paint the insides of my mind you’d end up with a fucking dystopian image reminiscent of Botticelli’s Map of Hell. And the worst part of my mindset is that as of late it’s getting progressively worse.

For a few reasons outside of my control I’ve spent the past couple of weeks living in a state of high stress and constant anger, and if it weren’t for my current holiday I’d probably have fallen apart by now. The wanderlust that had been growing inside of me, urging me to travel, to explore, to understand is the very thing that has kept me from exploding into a tirade of uncensored rage. My journey into the world so that I can better understand myself could not have come at a better time. It allows be to take a step back from the life that sees me constantly putting my dreams second to someone else’s and reassess where I am in my life and where I truly want to be. Wanderlust is that feeling, that urge to travel and explore the world. But that doesn’t necessarily restrict us to the physical world. It also urges us to explore ourselves, to understand the catalysts and compulsions that drive us towards our inevitable success or eventual failure every single day.

With that being said, the next two weeks of my life are going to be extremely engaging. As I venture through a land foreign to my own I will also strive to do so from an internal perspective. I’m not trying to be the next Buddha, I’m not going to sit underneath a Bodhi tree and wait for a moment of divine clarity or an epiphany that suddenly sees me racing down a path to success or enlightenment. I’m just trying to better understand myself so that one day my dreams do ultimately become my realities.

Appeasing the Ignorant

Have you ever watched that scene in Joss Whedon’s theatrical adaptation of Marvel’s The Avengers when Bruce Banner reveals that the secret to controlling his rage is that he is always angry? I like the idea of concealing a deep rooted issue in plain sight, and in many ways my own anger and frustration operate in a fashion similar to Banner, aka the Hulk. For all of my talk of positivity and being the best damn person you can be, there will always be an angry arsehole living just below the surface of my friendly veneer. I’ve talked about it before in this very blog; I write better when a part of me is seething with rage, so I live in this strange limbo where I try to project positivity into the world whilst secretly stoking my own fires of angst and aggression.

But a couple of days ago someone else was stupid enough to stoke those fires for me, and now all that positivity and happiness has turned to ashes as my aggression rips across my soul like a fire through a dusty field. You see, at the risk of sounding arrogant I feel like I need to let all of you know that I’m actually a highly intelligent, aggressive, and incredibly unique individual; and much of my life is spent dumbing down my personality so that all the fucking knuckle draggers in this world don’t feel threatened or uneasy by my presence.

It’s actually surprisingly easy to dumb down one’s own intelligence and pretend that those around you are more intellectual than their I.Q actually suggests. Most of my days are spent appeasing the ignorant and manipulating those around me into believing that I actually give a shit about the nonsensical garbage that forms the cornerstones of their day to day lives. And for the most part people are happy to live in this fantasy world where they can wallow in their own inflated sense of importance. But every now and then my little social experiments go awoll and some fucking halfwit actually thinks that he is better than me, or smarter than me, or he catches a glimpse of what I am truly capable of and suddenly his bullshit world of self-worth is threatened by a man he once considered to be his lessor.

My recent instance of such a situation has left me scratching my head at where things went wrong after someone dared to question my integrity. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, some of which haven’t been too nice, but until now I’ve never had anyone question my reliability and deem anything that I have done as unsatisfactory. I’m not just any run of the mill fuckwit; if I commit to a task I give it one hundred and ten per cent, and you can be damn sure that I will succeed in whatever I do. Which is why I find myself somewhat blown away that some fucking simpleton actually believes that he has the right to question or judge anything that I do.

Right now as I write this one half of me wants to remain in my passive Bruce Banner mode and continue down the honourable path of remaining the better man in this situation. The other half of me however would love to figuratively turn into a raging green beast and tear down the world of the ignorant misguided dick who actually thinks that he can compete with me on any platform. I know that the reason behind my aggressor’s recent dig is nothing more than simple jealousy; when a man as weak as he is threatened he often resorts to petty torments as a means of justifying his own worthless existence. So rather than let another’s petty bullshit bring me down I’m making a conscious effort to be the bigger man here. I’m making a conscious effort to walk away.

Sun Tzu said that ‘in ancient times skillful warriors first made themselves invincible, and then watched for vulnerability in their opponents.’ So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll make myself invincible, and when I have, and when I’ve achieved everything that I deserve, I’ll run the little piss ant into the ground and turn his entire world to ashes.

Oh the irony! (Social media & whingers)

Here it is; the post where I wallow in my own self-importance and hypocrisy and take aim at well… pretty much everybody. See I’ve got a bit of a bee in my bonnet at the moment and it’s all because of a little thing called social media. Now before I start my completely one sided degradation of the entertainment medium, I will acknowledge that a great deal of my followers have come from social media, and that in its own bizarre way social media actually has a place in modern day society. However, there are limits to what social media can offer society, and it’s only so long before mankind takes a good thing and devalues the living shit out of it to the point where it becomes just another soap box for us to preach our own ignorance and self-indulgence from.

There’s a lot of rubbish associated with social media. There always has been and there always will be. From people’s continuous need to post endless torrents of pictures of themselves, or to update their status so that the world knows every miniscule detail of their (mundane) day to day lives, and I can deal with that. I’ve resided to the fact that we live in a very superficial world where people can justify their own existence by gaining the approval of others through likes. But the thing that really frustrates the living shit out of me is people who feel the need to air out all of their problems on a platform where the whole world is privy to their self-pity and babbling bullshit.

The thing is… I don’t care about your problems. If you are fighting with a significant other or an ex-lover, or are just having a bad day, then that’s not my fucking concern. So stop force feeding your miserable updates down my throat every five minutes. It really is that serious. Sometimes my life is so overcome by the incessant whining of others that I feel like my eyes are on the verge of bleeding out, and all it would take for them to do so is one more ludicrous post. Social media is a form of entertainment. We check our Facebook, Twitter, or whatever else as a means of amusement, meaning that when we venture into the world of social media we are searching for light hearted posts and pictures. We want to see our friends (and I use the term loosely here) enjoying themselves so that we in turn can feel good about our own lives. But lately there are more and more moaning whingers taking to social media in an effort to have their opinions heard. And what’s worse is that other serial complainers are actually justifying the existence of these fucking depressing posts by liking them or commenting with even more heinously pathetic shit.

I do realise how hypocritical and ironic this all sounds. I take to this blog every so often in a fit of rage and unleash my frustrations at the world through a tirade of words that leaves the reader feeling like I should probably seek professional help. But I justify my own rants by following the train of thought that what I do on this blog is creative and a form of art. The readers who view my posts actively seek out my page and settle in for a thousand word slice of what’s on my mind at any given point in time. When I post an update I aim to provide posts of substance rather than merely producing useless entries that are only skin deep. More often than not I pour my very heart and soul into what I post and at times I can be left shattered by the lack of response from my reader base (although more often than not the response does surpass my meager expectations).

So why do people do it? Why do they feel the need to take something like social media and turn it into a fucking soapbox where they can hang their dirty laundry for the entire world to see? The answer is never going to be simple. But one of the biggest reasons behind this is mankind’s own insecurities and yearning desire to feel accepted. In days gone by when we felt down we would call a friend or seek them out to talk through our issues. Nowadays we live in a world so vain that we no longer feel satisfied to divulge our hopes, dreams, frustrations, and angst to our closest associates; we need the acceptance of the world as a whole. We need everyone to know just how miserable we are so that they can offer their condolences and justify our desires to be heard. And we have created the ultimate platform to achieve this: a little thing we call social media.

But the truth is that the only people who respond to these trashy posts are people of the same intellectual mindset. Damaged is as damaged does. Life is what you make it and if you choose to whittle it away complaining endlessly on social media in a desperate attempt to be noticed than you’re probably going to end up a sorry state in your later years. Take it from a guy who has been through the whole depression rigmarole; life can be hard at times but all in all it truly is an enjoyable experience. For those out there who feel the need to constantly clog up social media walls with their petty gripes against the world I want you to really stop and think for a moment…. Right now there are children in third world countries who are starving. There are countries at war, where the constant threat of death has the population in a state of perpetual fear. Even closer to home there are men and women sleeping on the streets within a five kilometre radius of your comfortable house because they don’t have the means to support themselves. Your problems: your fights with your partner, your inability to afford that holiday you want sooner, or your overall stance that the world is out to get you, are so insignificant and often so self-centred that if you were to view them from an impartial viewpoint you would probably laugh at your own shallowness.

Life is a gift and social media is just a form of entertainment. So next time you wish to take to your keyboard to bitch and moan about your life I want you to remember this: shut the fuck up, turn off your screen and if you have a problem go and face it head on. I know that sounds ironic for me to say, if it wasn’t for this blog I’d probably still be the emotional wreck that I was twelve months ago. But the truth is that I just don’t care about your depressing posts and updates. Show me light hearted, show me life. And please, for God’s sake stop force feeding me your negativity.

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