Sisyphusing Around. My New Vocation.
5/12/14
As I sit here this beautiful spring day (You can tell its spring because the homeless have begun to bloom as robins go through their pockets looking for grubs and stale lozenges.) I contemplate all of my poor choices in life and how they have conspired to bring me here to the outset of a new career – I’m going to be a blogger! (He says with the halted enthusiasm of Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend getting a tattoo of his new boo).
St. Peter don't ya call me cause I can't go. I owe my scroll to the blogger next door.
At first glance, it seems to be a suitable fit. I’ll finally be able to enjoy a beautiful day from the comfort of an air-conditioned office, I can indulge my penchant for froth ranting (Similar to the Kerouacian stream of consciousness but with more spittle) and there’s no heavy lifting. The down side is that there are well over 91 billion bloggers active today. And that’s just counting the paleo-cleanse blogs. Incidentally, a quick Google search brought up almost 540,000 blogs about how to write your first blog. I’ve decided to go with English and the hunt and peck technique.
The magnitude of my problem became clear as I sat down to write this very post. What can I say that hasn’t already been said? Maybe, “You know who'd sound great on this?...Bob Dylan“, or “Welcome back to the oxygen bar” or “Hold the bacon”? (That last one you may have heard if you’ve ever been an accomplice during a butcher shop heist). The fact is there’s nothing new under the sun and given that fact I feel it’s warranted to plagiarize.
It’s not like I’d be the first to borrow somebody else’s ideas. I believe it was Harold Stravinsky who said, “All the best ideas are stolen.” To which his brother Igor promptly took the credit. With all due respect to Taro Gomi everybody also steals. Think of Elvis, Marconi and Steve Jobs. And do you really think Hitler came up with the plan to invade Poland on his own? He totally got the idea from Shirley Temple.
Think about it. If there were ever a haven for bootlegging it would be the world of blogs. Links and likes. Re-tweets and re-posts. There are blogs that are nothing but other people’s pictures. And can we just concede that every attempt at humor by posting a list is just a hackneyed theft of Letterman? Frankly, I’m a little concerned about posting any novel content. Not just that it might be stolen but that my original expressions might get me blacklisted from the Huffington Post.
The real problem here is that, like many morbidly unoriginal men, I’ve carefully crafted the art of stealing jokes. In high school a good joke was the only chance I had with girls once I realized that they don’t care for our breasts they way we do theirs. Ripping off Eddy Murphy and Billy Crystal is how I got my first girlfriend. Sadly, by the end of my freshman year I was empty. Every joke, funny story and witty observation I had ever heard from actual amusing people had been used up in just a few precious months. Soon her understanding demeanor over my repeating myself evolved into semi-polite toleration, then overt eye rolling, then open hostility and finally violence. It seems that my delightful and amusing stories had run their course, as did my delightful and amusing jokes and my delightful and amusing observations. Clearly she had seen all of the same episodes of MASH that I had. It was the last time I made reference to “meatball surgery” that got me shivved.
Now, according to Mack Collier – yes that Mack Collier – wait, who? As I write my first blog I’m supposed to: 1. Make sure readers understand who I am and what my intentions are (I’m SK and I’m here to make your daughter hate me). 2. Explain why I am blogging (To justify paying rent on an office outside of my home). 3. Explain what I will be blogging about (This is where it kind of gets a little fuzzy). 4. Let the reader know how they can leave feedback (Frankly, if I wanted to read other people’s stuff I’d understand DUNE references). That’s all a little daunting and I’m going to need a swig of some literary courage to put out new material every week. So with all of that being understood there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll be lifting a joke or two. But don’t worry. They’ll be obscure enough that you probably won’t even notice.
It all started when my friend, Who Sanchez, got called up from triple A to play first base for the Mets…