Hal - Deliberately Basic

New Years Rationalizations For 2007

I know the old saw, make resolutions and break them, so why even make them? Because by nature, human beings rationalize, and without rationalization, we would never accomplish anything. In keeping with the other bullshit we propagate throughout each year, here then is my New Years Rationalizations for 2007.

1. I would try to lose this gut that I hate to see every morning before I shower. But for my age and physical condition its not all that bad.

2. Following the rationalization above, I would make a plan to workout more for overall health and longevity. But, see number 1 for physical condition.

3. I would learn to relax more and not allow the stress of work and life get to me, but only if certain individual negative-thinking sons-a-bitches stop causing all my problems.

4. I woud read more to improve myself intellectuality. But then I would require a whole new circle of friends to discuss the deep philosophical shit I’ve learned. Note to self: Whatever… .

5. I should take more time to spend with my family, if it will enhance my life. But my closest blood relatives consists of a couple of self-absorbed, emotionally dysfunctional shits, with whom I have nothing in common. Thank God I am not like them.

6. I would give more to charity. But not anything that comes in the mail. If I give once to them, they will send me useless address labels, calendars, or odd shit I don’t use, and play on my emotions once a month to get more money.

7. I would be a better citizen, but I don’t know what that means, exactly. I think I used to know, but since Gee Dubya has become king, I just don’t feel certain about anything anymore. What this country needs is more cynicism.

8. Number five is no longer applicable.

9. I should buckle-up for safety with the car seat belt. Unless of course I’m in a hurry, or have a suit and tie on. Hey, when they find my ass in the top of a tree somewhere, I want to be looking good.

10. And finally, because it just don’t get any better than this, I should stop smoking. This is so easy I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t do it. Actually, I don’t smoke, but I’m tired of all the reformed smokers who preach incessantly about the evils of what was once a common pleasure.

10a. I should start smoking again just to piss off the sermonizers.

Hal Brown

While I wasn’t paying attention

I didn’t know the guy of course, but he left an impression on me as I watched him dance with his wife, or whatever she was to him at the time. He was a big man, late forties, his tee shirt ballooned out from the weight of his belly, and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He towered over his wife, or whatever she was, pulled her in close, and I wondered if his scruffy beard bothered her, but she didn’t seem to mind at all, smiling, obviously relishing the closeness they enjoyed. They closed their eyes and shuffled to the music of “Only You” by The Platters, and I imagined this must have been exactly what they did at the high school dance, perhaps thirty years earlier. What had they learned in thirty years, besides the obvious lessons of life, the hard times, the good times, the spectrum of human life that everyone learns?

I was at least close in age to this man, yet I didn’t feel a connection, a generational collective that joins people of the same genesis. This couple, except for their apparent age, seemed to have been arrested in time somewhere back around 1959, never having moved forward with the rest of the world, never seeing what was going on around them, and even worse, not giving a damned. This was blissful ignorance incarnate, and I had the good fortune to be there and see it happening.

What had I done that was so great, so much better, that I could have the temerity to see myself as a notch up the old chain of evolution from them? How could I sit there and judge them, look down my nose at them, as if they had not done much to improve the world, or earned the right to be silly for a short time? I wondered about that and why I felt different, saw things different than I did when I was their age thirty years earlier.

Obviously, I felt nothing in common with these people because there was nothing to feel. I am neither better or worse for having made the world better or worse, and neither are they. I do not believe it is cynical to say that nearly everyone in the world will ultimately fade into nothingness, and in the future someone may look at our picture with a fleeting glance. This is reality.

Hal Brown

Gasoline and Fat-Asses

I just read that over 900,000,000 gallons of extra gasoline is wasted each year due to Americans being overweight. Who can say if this is really true; it was an estimate, and I don’t know the criteria for this estimation. But for the sake of interesting bullshit trivia, let us assume that it is half true. More than a half billion gallons of gas is burned each year hauling around a bunch of fat-ass Americans.

This brings to mind a lot of mental imagery, of huge people piling in the family car to pick up dinner at KFC, rolling arm blubber reaching for another double-cheese burger with large fries, fat people driving to eat and get fatter.

I’m not certain what to be worried about right now. The news media is not clear about the current state of what may kill me first. I don’t listen to smoking ads anymore, or the seatbelt horrors, drinking disasters, my brain on drugs, and lawnmower lampoons. We are all saturated with these things and frankly, I’m bored with them.

But fat-assed gas guzzlers, now that is news, and worthy of being reported two or three hundred times a day. There is money to be made telling me what to worry about, and here it is, right in front of the do-gooders, practically begging to be made into the next crusade.

Come on corporate news spinners, don’t keep me in suspense. Should I worry about fat people driving or what?

Hal Brown

The Power of the Platitude

If you can find a single sentence without a Cliché in this piece, I’ll eat my hat.

Whether talking or writing, but with an emphasis on writing, most people are so trite, they prattle on and on with unrelenting verbal sleeping pills, and after a while they begin to sound like a babbling brook, or worse turn into a persona non grata. It’s a crying shame that most communication is in the form of time worn platitudes and clichés as old as the hills. Writers need to take the bull by the horns, stand back, and look before they leap when releasing their work for public scrutiny. After all, as my grandfather used to say, if you want to make an omelette you have to break some eggs.

The average John Q. Public may not understand the difference between a well-written piece and the shameful slop that passes for good writing, or even if he does know, may be apathetic and not care. We live in a time when a well-rounded education is as rare as hen’s teeth, where most people specialize in a particular discipline, and the so-called Renaissance man has fallen by the wayside. Of course this raises several questions, such as, how did this sad state of affairs come about? How do we find a solution for this, or even a band-aid fix? And most importantly, is the situation going to decline even further and snowball into a state of chaotic non-communication?

The ocean of knowledge that exists now is so huge that mastering even a single subject has stretched beyond the bounds of possibility, especially now that the focus, like stink on a June bug, is so much on technology. As we know, what goes round comes round, and shit happens, but this situation is entirely out of hand. A whiz-kid who can write thousands of lines of computer code often cannot fire off a simple English sentence that would make sense to a goose, let alone the world at large. And some of these kids, like a cat covering up crap on the freeway, are faster than a one-armed paper hanger. But technology is not the only fly in the ointment. Getting a liberal education is like looking for a needle in a haystack. You could swear on a stack of bibles that it just doesn’t exist anymore.

Besides a need to be well rounded, a writer needs the nurturing of other writers, that is, he needs to be familiar with what good writing is, just as hogs need slop. Editors can be as cold as a witch’s tit when it comes to picking and choosing what to publish. You have to be a glutton for punishment to want to be a writer these days, especially fiction or poetry writing. But, if that’s what blows your skirt up, then you have to follow that dream. On the other hand, you have fingers, or at least a writer should.

Non-fiction writing is much easier to get a handle on, as far as getting published, than fiction writing. If you can whack off a book about anything to do with computers, for instance, you are much more likely to be successful marketing it than say, a sappy, run of the mill romance novel. This does not mean that bad writing will suffice in non-fiction, and if you think that is the case, you are barking up the wrong tree trying to get published. Even non-fiction needs to pack a punch, and make learning fun for the reader.

Good speech habits, correct diction, and a good vocabulary, are as necessary as air if you want to write well. Just remember, zero is sometimes better than nothing. You don’t want to rock the boat, but you do want people to pay attention, so half a loaf is better than none. This is called precision, and better to be safe than sorry. If you fail to cultivate these virtues in yourself, then you won’t have a Chinaman’s chance in hell of achieving success as a writer, and remember, if you’re not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Let this be your paradigm for self-improvement, and by all means, don’t sweat the small stuff, but don’t quote me on that.

Hal Brown