WRONG!

Does anyone remember The McLaughlin Group? I'm sure you do. My parents would put this on when we got home from church on Sunday during that interval between getting home and football being on, and it was pretty much just background noise while we made lunch. All the show's pundits really ever did was yell at each other.

There was something mildly endearing about the show; they yelled at each other but they at least had to do it face-to-face. And they had that rule where the pundits were supposed to yield anytime John McLaughlin spoke. You can tell McLaughlin likes being ridiculous. (Wow, just finding out this show is still on!) There's clearly something that's kept it going for three decades and it isn't just people turning it on for background noise. It was kind of surreal and entertaining to me as a teenager, plus McLaughlin's face looks like a bulldog's.

I think everyone to some degree secretly wants to be their own version of John McLaughlin, and ideology doesn't really matter as long as you yell loud enough. Just about everybody's got an easy way to yell something out and there's a whole mess of websites dedicated to telling us what certain people yelled. I suppose it's kind of always been this way at least on some level, but there's something dark beneath the excess of it all.

Please feel free to tell me that I'm just getting older and that things aren't always what they seem, but here's a thought: in the time before Mega-Internet's 24-hour social media/fake news and the 1 Million ways to Personalize every aspect of everything, the majority of issues/stories that rose to national attention seemed a bit more important. Sure you'd get hyper-media stuff like OJ Simpson's car chase, or Marv Albert being insane and biting women, or whatever, but things like that in national media weren't a daily occurrence.

Now there's more like an hourly occurrence of something made to seem vital to your experience as a human, somebody shouting their very firm beliefs, somebody else shouting back. Yesterday's NY Times made me laugh out loud with the headline "Maine Nurse Goes for Defiant Bike Ride" -- sure Ebola's important, but until we've got shorelines crawling with infected folks I don't think I need to know the hourly whereabouts of somebody who might not even have the disease. Look at this shit; this got feature story billing for a bit:

"She rode down a quiet paved road with her boyfriend, Ted Wilbur, followed closely by the police and a caravan of reporters. The couple rode less than a mile, then turned onto a graded gravel trail on a former railroad right of way flanked by pines. Ms. Hickox and Mr. Wilbur, wearing jackets in the crisp Maine morning, returned to the house an hour later."

The crisp Maine morning! Man that is stupid. That piece got two by-lines, by the way.

But on to the darker thing: regular ol' folks getting their random doings somehow published all over creation gives false hope to this weird desire we all have to be famous. That dang woman Hickox got her defiant bike ride covered! Then the universe starts to shrink and the possibility of me, me, me being at the center of everything seems somehow stronger. The carrot is just about in reach. All I have to do is be a little more opinionated, daring, or outrageous and everyone might watch me, too! Then everything will be OK.

But most people won't get noticed, at least not in the way they're hoping. Then there's a nasty letdown and really important things get pushed aside. It's a little hard to see where this all leads; it's not like it's necessarily bad to be entertained, but to be made to feel like you're not successful if enough people aren't watching/reading what you're doing is deeply sad.

My great hope is that it leads to whole swaths of people getting phenomenally bored with this lukewarm entertainment. I think it's already starting to happen, though I don't have any firm data to present. It's just a feeling. Everything looks a little upside-down at the moment, but it's a welcome new perspective. It's a good time to not really give a shit and do whatever you want; maybe nobody's looking but I think that's all the better. It definitely feels more real that way, and if nobody's listening you don't have to yell.

'Til next time; bye-BYYYE.

It's a liar...so everything it says is a lie.

Today I almost threw caution to the wind and submitted a very short thing I wrote to this new...thing; I'm not sure what to call it other than a Website:

www.really-short-stories.com

Short stuff is wonderful. In more recent memory, a fantastic short story by George Saunders called "Sticks" in his collection Tenth of December was one of my favorite things consumed in 2013. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's very short novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold is tied in my mind with Crime and Punishment as the coolest thing I read junior year in high school. Some of those Pixar short films they show before the full deal movie are nearly as good as the full feature.

So it's not really about length (haaa), right? It's about what you say; the ol' cliche, which turns out to be unequivocally true.

But boy does this website suck. They talk about wanting to compete with Buzzfeed lists and Vine videos; that's like putting a raw onion in the candy bar aisle. They call it Short Fiction for the A.D.D. Generation, and go on to say, "No, this won't be exactly like getting published, so think of it more as contributing to a collective of young writers looking to create fiction that your peers will actually read in it's [sic] entirety."

So you're gonna bash a whole generation for not reading--then ask them to read? I'm pretty sure the folks running this site don't really read too much either. If they did, they would know that the American short story is doing just fine. There's something like a billion and a half literary journals out there now and you have to just, you know, read and find the good stuff. Turns out when you do even a little exploring, there's plenty of brilliant writing to go around. All lengths and sizes are represented in wonderful ways (heeeee).

Besides, the real competitor to Buzzfeed doesn't even give a shit; and knocks short stuff out of the park anyway. 

And, hey, my own short thing is getting longer! (Is this bad joke getting old?) Not too long, though, and when it's done I'll probably post it here instead of submitting to some grubby website that wants to compete with tabloids.

But while you're here, check out another drum video I did a month or so ago and forgot to post: