Essays
ON THE WORD ‘GOT’
My old english professor doesn’t like the word ‘Got’. He thinks it’s lazy and guttural. Got.
“I got some eggs.” He claims there is always a better verb around the corner. “I bought some eggs.” Heck, “I came home with some eggs.” How about instead of ‘I got some eggs’, “I stayed home for an entire month concentrating, until I laid some eggs.” That seems like a far better replacement for the word ‘got’. My english professor is lazy. He wants to change the word got, for a better verb, when the entire sentence is in need of help!
Besides that, how great that the word is guttural?! In this world full of memes and microwaves, fast food, instant satisfaction, Donald Trump, corn syrup, internet, shouldn’t we have a word that functions with great utility and only requires a mere grunt? Have. That word is for fops and dandies. I GOT some things. And make sure they are things. No need for descriptors. There is no time for that. We are in a hurry. Don’t pull over to explain to me the specifics about the things you have. You got some things. I got some things. Lets keep it moving.
My old english professor gave me a passing grade. He was actually quite fond of me, but we argued a lot. He didn’t like the phrase ‘a lot’! Wanted me to say frequently, or describe an argument in detail. He didn’t seem to like anything I did that streamlined language. He was always asking me to ‘be specific’, ‘paint a picture’, ‘set the scene’. But I had to argue with him about elegance.
The english language is like a math problem. What are we doing in most maths? We are trying to find the most elegant expression. 4 (4x) + (2x) = 72 I had to google that. But the answer is 4… or something like that. The point is, that’s too complicated!. Nobody wants to solve for X! And the same goes for reading and writing. So you can keep your 50 dollar words, Mr. Professor, I got some things to talk about and I’m not going to let a lot of this nonsense slow me down. I’m trying to simplify and reduce language. Express myself while saving energy and sparing people from sweating it out.
I cannot wait until they make little devices so we can hear each other’s thoughts. Or see them rather! Now, yes I am a writer, but only as a tool for expression and communication. If you could see my thoughts. My thoughts are the gots of thoughts! Beautifully simple. Thoughts that come from the most primitive and base section of the brain. Ideas so starved of complexity that they cannot even be written. I’ll try right now: “Balloon animal, dirt apple, wal-mart, chow!!” It’s too much. That’s not the picture I had in my brain.
I will be the first poet to transmit my poems into your brain. Like a Kurt Vonnegut novel. My poems will be guttural. They will be written by apps on phones. Autopoem. Without me paying any attention. My poems will be prolific. And will go something along these lines.
Got a lot
Got a lot of things.
Some things
Are better than other things.
I feel good.
But some things,
feel baaaaad.
You got a lot of feels?
Things make it better.
But watch out!
Some things make it baaaaddd.
I’m working my way towards that. I’ll be history’s first true poet for the people. A fast food poet. McPoetry. “Yes, watch out! Some things do make it bad.” Back in college, when my professor proposed that we watch our limp words, poor verbs, trite adjectives, I took it a step further. I thought, better watch out for limp plots, unimaginative characters, a boring life! So I turned over every phrase in every single sentence, paragraph and paper. If I was trying to say: “The capitalist plan to create more wealth for individual corporations, leads to the outsourcing of jobs to countries with cheaper labor and thus globalization and the spread of industrial capitalism,” I would say it more like this:
“The half life of industry is seen in the moves of corporations around the world. They leave a trail of industry and technology in every country they set up shop in. McDonald’s is available all over the planet. Coca-Cola has advertised to every single person on Earth. Their only move for expansion, is to gain Pepsi’s share of the market. Third World countries will eventually be replaced with capitalist economies as the Money Grubbing Overlords move from one place to another, trying to find cheap labor. This isn’t as horrendous as it seems, because for every building built haphazardly and with no attention to slavery type conditions, there is also increased access to education, the internet, technology as a whole and those things which we deem to make for a quality life, here in America. I make no argument for laissez-faire economics. Or that the trade of technology, for unsafe work conditions, is a good or ethical one, but I merely point out the fact that it is happening. The trend is that we will, on a long enough time line, share some semblance of capitalism, in every corner of the earth. And that the half-life of each industrial power will grow shorter and shorter as technology advances. Automation will replace the jobs that humans don’t want to do and maybe we’ll resemble something like Pixar’s dystopian film Wall-E. But perhaps the future will be more utopian and we will all receive bio-tech implants in our brains, that allow us to communicate without words and update into Euphoria and Enlightenment. The Enlighment Update 9.01.2 is the one that will take all of mankind into Nirvana.” But I’m working towards using language in a smoother fashion yet:
“McRib guys gotta make more money. America got too many laws for da McRibs. Make a McRib on the moon! No laws there.”
The point is, the most elegant expression is the one that reduces the complexity. That does the work. Twitter is the philosophy of the common man. Can you do more, with less?
Have Milk?
Heck NO!!
Got Milk.
I DON'T KNOW HOW I GOT MY TASTE
My folks are both MAGA Christians. They had me when they were very young. I am the first born, so I had to hang out with a few older boys in order to learn anything. My dad had a few tapes in his collection, but not much. I remember he had a Steve Martin tape. I liked that.
I was about ten when they got really into Christianity. The first ten years of my life I don’t really remember. But I do know my mom read to me voraciously. They also got us a bunch of encyclopedias. I would just sit and read those. First the kids’ encyclopedias, then the adult ones. I’d flip around and find things.
It could’ve been the vacuum of culture that made me turn so hard toward culture.
When I was a kid, if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I pretty much had one of two answers any given day: a baseball player or a writer. By writer, however, I mostly meant the guy who drew the covers to R.L. Stine books. R.L. was the coolest thing smoking when I was a kid. Funny because, as a kid, the books felt so naturally male to me. He may as well have been Roger Clemens. Instead he chose initials because he wanted people to think he was a woman.
So, my folks, too young to know how to do anything in the early ‘90s, left me to read encyclopedias and now I curate art at a museum.
End of essay.
Jk.
Somewhere in there I started going to a school for the gifted. Middle school. I was surrounded by really bright kids. Kids who said they wanted to work at NASA. Dancers. Mathematicians. They were bussed in from neighborhoods richer than mine. They had parents at home directing their futures. Some of the kids were Muslim or Hindu, a far cry from my white suburban upbringing.
I couldn’t compete with them smarts wise. I’m smart, sure. I’m okay. I know a few things. But I’m not special.
So I had to be funny.
It was my only way to stand out.
This affected my taste right around puberty. I got into comedy.
I liked edgy jokes. Pranks. Outsiders. And this probably had a huge effect on me. As much as the voracious reading in childhood, now I was learning to select things. I was selecting things I could mimic for a reward from my peers. Jim Breuer in Half Baked was a favorite at the time.
Looking back, I think that’s when I became a curator.
Not an art curator.
Just somebody who liked finding things and handing them to other people.
At the same time, I was being introduced to The Catcher in the Rye and other cultural watermarks in school. We were a bit ahead of a lot of schools. I remember we had a structured class debate about capital punishment. I did academic track and I was a participant in Potpourri. That was a segment where your team had to do a little of everything. Our school always won.
A little of everything.
That’s kinda who I have always been.
I didn’t know it then.
I’m not sure I even like that about myself. I’ve always envied the person who can fully commit to one thing. But everything has always seemed so interesting to me. I like a little bit of everything.
I had a boss once tell me he could listen to anyone talk about their job for fifteen minutes. That resonated with me. Very interesting. Tell me about your work. And why you hate your boss. I got fifteen. I like to know everything.
In high school I became a burnout. A stoner. I hung out almost exclusively with older kids. In ninth grade they put me in a few tenth grade classes. Tenth grade, some eleventh. Eventually I became friends with kids who were already in college. They gave me their college books.
And they gave me weed.
I was smoking weed and reading Siddhartha and On the Road in ninth and tenth grade.
I think this is where I got pretentious.
I went to summer camp my whole life, and one kid there gave me a bunch of CDs every summer. His older brother was a DJ for a college radio station. So I was listening to Pavement, Portishead, The Microphones, and all kinds of crazy shit as a high schooler. I immediately rejected Blink 182, though I loved Dude Ranch in middle school.
My college buddy had a friend even older than him, Beekman. They both worked at Hollywood Video. Beekman would hand us these completely tripped out movies to watch. Troma films. The Man with the Golden Arm. Re-Animator. Altered States. All of it.
My media consumption looked like a master’s student. I was just a high school burnout, dumbass, weed smoking loser. The neighbor was valedictorian.
I graduated dead last in my class.
I think that says a lot.
I only graduated because a teacher left a computer open and I walked over and typed in that I had completed a couple credits in an accelerated program.
Really, I had skipped class, smoked weed, and watched Trainspotting or Gummo.
My parents really had no clue any of this was going on. They found me on acid or mushrooms a few times, but I don’t think they understood the extent of the cultural programming I was undergoing. The sheer number of entry points. How many books, movies, records and people were quietly shaping me. Or how far I had drifted away from ever believing in their God.
They got the newspaper and made dinner most nights. I would read the paper and eat. That was a quiet luxury. I loved that. They made a home I could stumble back to drunk. They gave me bookshelves to put all the crazy shit I kept bringing home.
I guess I do know where my taste came from. It came from everything I was exposed to throughout my whole life.
A book from my mom.
A Steve Martin tape from my dad.
Older kids.
Weird movies.
College radio.
A newspaper at dinner.
Looking back, I don’t think taste is something you discover by yourself.
I think it’s something people hand to you, little by little, if you’re lucky enough to keep saying yes.
It came from being lucky enough to have a void there.
And a need to fill it.