jayhat

Archive for September, 2009|Monthly archive page

Shades of Gray

In non-fantastical, Sports, What people are on September 21, 2009 at 10:46 pm

My friend,

This is not a world of extremes. Surely, extremes do, in fact, exist, but they are rare. Really rare. As rare as a perfect circle or a certain snowflake. As rare as you are exactly–exactly–the same.

Extremes are defined by what they aren’t. They aren’t what everything else is. In shades, black is extreme because it is [not white]. White is extreme because it is [not black].

Every other shade is some variation of gray because it has at least a little black and a little white.

In the shade spectrum, there are a single two extremes for infinite grays.

This, extrapolated, is how life is. Given something–anything–there are two extremes that provide counterexamples rest of the mass of humanity.

Think of this in sports terms, if you will–if we can agree that there exists someone, at sometime, who was the best at a given sport or event or position–then he or she or it is one extreme–or [not bad]. The other extreme, then, is the individual who was the worst–or [not good].

–And just as surely as someone–at his or her or its peak–was the best, someone must have been the worst–

Everyone else, since they weren’t [not bad] or [not good] are a shade of gray, some combination of bad and good, no matter how close he or she or it is to a given extreme.

–Or, the second best putter ever–ever–to touch a golf club is/was/will be slightly more bad than the best putter in the history of humanity, who is, by our definition [not bad]–

The reason I bring this up is because the ratio of anything to infinity is zero. Despite the fact that the world speaks in extremes–in labels and genre and hyperbole and shortcut–extremes are statistically insignificant. We speak of conservative and liberal, of smart and stupid, qualified and unqualified. We speak of amateurs and experts, of best and worst, quickest, tallest, and shortest. Of exceptional. Of insubstantial. Of gay and straight.

If, statistically, no one is any one thing, then everyone must be composites of everything. Yet, no one ever acknowledges this fact.

The Fall

In Ancillarious, novelish, Writing on September 17, 2009 at 7:54 pm

Something happened and then the midnight sky bled with the embers of a burning city.

Below, a stale crimson fog lavished and hung. The sewers flooded through broken pipes, a viscous water that stank of dog and rot and sweat, an earthy dew that salted the seas of crumbled grain.

Within minutes, they grey remains of death covered the streets, inches deep in a mid-summer blizzard, each unique flake a piece of something that used to be. Leaves, stone, people, birds, glass, metal, wood, rubber, plastic, tile, bugs and worms and grubs. All soot and ash. Crosses, apses, domes, pillars and pews and pulpits. All soot and ash.

Within hours, waves washed the streets. Mildew corpses moldered in fish stew, a fecund boil that begat a fine green salt that dried in clumps and lined the rubble with undulating stencils that parodied the tide…

Writing (as it pertains to Darwin)

In Language, novelish, Writing on September 13, 2009 at 10:57 am

It’s a landmark moment in every writer’s life when he receives his first rejection letter, and it can affect him in a number of ways.

Possibly,

If he is foolish enough to believe that his work was actually as good as he felt it was—to chew the very truffles he dug up—the letter comes with humility. It is the recognition that it is not a perfect work, that he is not infallible. That some people just don’t jive with everything he writes, lean on every word, enunciate the last phoneme of every sentence. That nothing is ever finished as long as there is someone who disagrees with it. That if everyone agrees with something, it must not really say anything.

This man—he, who had been foolish and ignorant—can either learn his lesson or he can become a brick wall, believing the rejection is no fault of his own; the publisher simply has bad taste and it is to his detriment that he rejects such a fine piece of literature.

Or,

If this man lacks the confidence to withstand criticism, a rejection might mean the end. Some people take resistance as a challenge; others shy from it, choosing instead to live safely within their limitations. Why risk failure when the alternative is so comfortable? There’s regret, sure, but regret is for the feeble. Regret only irks those motivated enough to do something about it. And if one is willing to do something about regret, a challenge should have been of no consequence in the first place. In which case, we are talking of cowards and misers.

To whom criticism is of no consequence.

For it is their nature.

But,

If this man is realistic enough to realize that even the smoothest roads need to be repaved from time to time—that achievement is relative to what one is capable of—he will see rejection is a rite of passage, something every author experiences, a yardstick for measuring miles.

* * * *

Which is interesting, because:

An author will go back on his previous works and read, utterly embarrassed.

The work is alien. Commas are not where they should be. Too many superlatives. What awful, contrived dialogue.

The embarrassment is not that it is poorly written; rather, the embarrassment is that, at one point—maybe not even that long ago—the author had been convinced that the writing was very nearly flawless.

Writing evolves.

Like anything worth doing, it gets better the more it’s practiced.

But the feeling upon completion never changes.

Check it.

In Getting Close, Post Script, What people are on September 10, 2009 at 11:51 am

Check it.  Uncomfort: the feeling when I don’t know what/why/how I’m doing.  Comfort: the feeling that I know what/why/how I’m doing.

The problem is this–Comfort: familiarity.  Familiarity: easy.  Easy: boredom.

Boredom leads to transition, which leads to not knowing what/why/how I’m doing: uncomfort.

Uncomfort and boredom.  To do away with one is to invariably lead to the other.

****

Check it.  A girl is good enough for me only when I decide she’s too good for me.  If I decide she’s too good for me–and I get her regardless–she’s decided that I’m good enough for her, which means she’s not too good for me, which means she’s not good enough for me.

How fucked up is that?

Rejected Blog Idea #5

In Rejected Blog Themes on September 10, 2009 at 11:36 am

A blog in 140 character bursts that inundates those who follow me with the inanities of my interaction with the world that exists within the six inches in front of my face.

On Regret:

In novelish, What people are on September 7, 2009 at 5:46 pm

It does no good to regret things, if you like who you are.

To regret something is to wish change upon yourself. If you learn from your mistakes, anything you would regret has only made you stronger. If nothing else, you learned never to do that something ever again—which you would have no way of knowing if it had never happened.

To wish something undone is to open yourself up to repeating the mistakes of your past.

And the next time, you might not get anything out of it.

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