Wherein the mostly absent lackass poet laureate of 2o2p finally gets around to answering your questions, though not before he writes a thesis on language and the common forum troll.
Why I write for 2o2p
Anyone that took Honors English in high school is familiar with the concept that voluntary constraints of style and form can have a liberating effect on the creative process. While free verse and prose have their attraction there is nothing as liberating as accepting the Shakespearean sonnet as a template and torturing the language into a thought and metaphor that transcends the limits of the rhyming couplet.
Hell, even the window-lickers in my high school got to try their hand at haiku…
Prom night came and went
I was promised some bare tit
Shit on cockteases
Note how the kirej (or “cutting word”) “cockteases” is placed as the last on of the third metrical phrase. It defines and shapes the purpose of the poem.
Pure magic.
When the Legislative Assembly of 1791 came together in Paris they unwittingly mirrored this literary truism. The form, the actual arrangement of progressives and liberals to the left of the chamber and the conservatives and nationalists to the right, defined the shape of the debate between them. In the middle the masses (the proletariat (1) if you will) created from whole cloth the dialectical (2) space for the debate to settle. For the compromise that lent order to the chaos, for the coming together of ideas and dreams. From constraint and chaos came the shape of a mighty republic that French have been fucking up ever since.
Language creates ideas and gives birth to new language and expression which creates ideas ad infinitum.
There are those that decry the internet as the slayer of literacy. That say that 1337 speak and txt msg will rob us of the magical legacy of the Bard and kill language. To them I say forget not that language is as ever our servant and master. While it binds us, it also lifts us above the beasts of the field. It provides us with a doorway to the souls of our fellows and while we may wrack, twist and reshape it, as long as men think and dream it will leap ahead of us lighting the way to a horizon undreamt of.
Not chicks though... they just want to talk till your ears bleed.
So here we are on the dawn of a new literary horizon. While the internet is young, it safe to say that it is past its BBS infancy and chat-room toddlerhood. Growing from them is a new consciousness and gestalt.(3) The online community is lifting itself from the crucible (4) of creation and is shaping the way men think and speak and write. In its brash new adolescence it has developed a new tool to carve us a space in the wilderness of the mind for ideas to come together -- a new watering hole where the hunter and prey play out their eternal battle of survival.
The “forum thread.”
It’s true that it has its faults. That it can become mired in tiresome repetition and endless lol cats. However its brash call-and-response rhythm evokes comparison to the Negro work songs of old and raises images of the sea chanty ringing out on storm-tossed decks. Whoever girds their loins and toes the line of the (just say for instance “Off-Topic”) forum must not just consider their own thoughts and feelings, not just the impending judgment of the ubiquitous grammar-nazi but also the inevitable and lightning-swift response of cultures so far removed from their own. At the pace of a speeding electron we are forced to make decisions that will cement forever our position in the newest community of men -- the online community. Take for instance the following exchange…
Dastard wrote…
…and while I’m not trying to bash those with firmly held beliefs, I honestly think that most Democrats are Democrats of convenience. That rather than answer the tough questions that mean the difference between whose sides gets the most bullets pumped into their young men they are hiding behind a naïve and dangerous façade of relativism and feel-goodery.
Dahji responds…
Eat a dick.
In a word, a world.
Note the elegance and clarity of the thesis. Note the subtle deprecation (5) of the antithesis. And watch now as from them both is born a synthesis of wonder. A world of questions and possibility born from the form of call and response. Should Dastard eat a dick? Of course it’s obvious that Dahji loves the dick, but does that mean Dastard should not eat the dick? Whose dick are we talking about here anyway? Weren’t there mods here a minute ago?
I can stay away for a while, but always the siren call of an instant audience draws me back. I can put my words out there and they will be loved and hated, laughed at or laughed with. I can find those I have things in common with and those who are worlds away. No matter how I ignore it while I am gone, it lives and breathes its own life.
I owe big apologies to people I befriended and abandoned, hopefully they’ll see that while I am a fair weather friend, most of the time the skies are clear in Bubbaland. It’s fun to write for 2old2play but it’s more fun to write with 2old2play. If you are reading this then you are one of the few that knows we have a front page and you might even be aware that it doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Drost and J-Cat and Caesar and lbsutke and No Game and Begonia and Waterborne and an assload of volunteers I’m too lame to mention do the heavy lifiting. They need help. They need editors and writers and artists who can spare a few hours a week and help them do what they love. Make this place a more fun and interesting place for us all to laugh and fight and play games. If you want to be the one that casts the deciding vote to kick me out of the P&W again then PM doodi and tell him to get off his lazy, gold-bricking ass and let you into the Magic Kingdom.
We get cake in the P&W.
I swear.
Now onto the questions…
Snuphy (who is seriously starting to creep me out) asks:
If I piss excellence, does something special happen when I dribble excellence on the tops of my shoes?
If I could piss excellence, would it smell like pee?
If someone passes gas while pissing excellence, does it smell excellent, or does it just smell like ass?
In order to piss excellence, what sort of suppository does one need to stuff? Is it larger or smaller than a bread box?
Hypothetically speaking, if I found a woman half my age who liked to “catch” or “wear” excellence, would it be wrong of me to provide her this sort of enjoyment? Or, also hypothetically speaking, if such a rare and highly prized woman could not be located, or in the event I couldn’t muster actual excellence, would it be inappropriate to instead “apply” my version of excellence to my wife as she sleeps?
While afflicted with morning wood, is it easier to piss excellence than it is to piss standard issue fluids?
If I could piss excellence, would my wife once again notice my now frequently neglected morning wood?
Would being able to piss excellence make me faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, or able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?
All right, we get it. Derek’s a dork, but he’s our dork and we love him anyway.
The Esteemed Dead Dr. asks: How big can Dsmooth's head get before his tiny chicken neck can no longer support it and he has to sleep with it in a wooden cradle, like the elephant man?
See Above. And keep your chins up big guy. We’re all having a good thought for you and yours. Never let the bastards get you down.
TDrag (who apparently spends about as much time on the site as I do these days) asks: What do you do for a living? (besides volunteer your time to the site in exchange for doodi's friendship)
When I was originally tapped to try a Q&A for the site the answer to this question was “not a whole hell of a lot.” Nowadays though the answer is- “serve in thralldom to a ginormous hospital system at the whim of any of the 23, 447 employees ahead of me in the chain of command.”
My main responsibility is helping people quit smoking. My secondary responsibilities include coordinating policy and procedure for taking the acute care facilities smoke-free campus wide, managing the State and Federal grants that my position depends on, performing outreach and community advocacy work on behalf of the State entities that pay my salary and knowing at all times where the 23,447 people ahead of me in the chain of command are at all times.
The time crunch of a major project coming to a head at the same time I acclimate to the new job is a major part of why this column has not been what the site deserves. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done better. In fact, I’m nominating Snuphy (He's as worthless as you in turning in articles. -- Ed.) to take the reins moving forward and if you want to harass the shit out of him to take over (or at least come up with shit for the front page that is as funny as what he writes in the forums) then post it up in the comments below. In the mean time, you can still send questions in here and complain about me here.
I’ll get to the questions when I damn well feel like it.
(1) Proletariat: the class of wage earners, esp. those who earn their living by manual labor or who are dependent for support on daily or casual employment; the working class.
(2) Dialectical: of or characteristic of a dialect; dialectal.
(3) Gestalt: : a structure, configuration, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts.
(4) Crucible: a container of metal or refractory material employed for heating substances to high temperatures.
(5) Deprication: to express earnest disapproval of.
