You’re full of shit…
KeithHandy posted in Featured Posts, Your Soul on January 19th, 2008
…so cut the shit!
“Well, I never!”, I can hear you say in gasping, blushing, brow-raised disgust, shielding your upper chest with the spread fingers of one shaky hand. Okay, okay. Lemme clarify. We’re all full of shit. Ah, that’s better, isn’t it?
See, I just filmed this short video blog, and — well, what I really did was just turned the camera on, and left it on for hours, until I finally had something to say. I initially shot and discarded over an hour of myself lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, sort of playing guitar along to music I didn’t know, out of tune, beating rhythms on my stomach, coughing, blowing my nose, and occasionally making the valiant attempt to speak to the camera. And when I finally felt I had said something worthwhile, and watched it back, I was disgusted by all the crap I said leading up to it.
“Oh, actually, I already know I’m full of shit”, I can hear some of you say. “I mean, I have a day job, and/or some difficult relatives, I sometimes have to interact with people I don’t like, it’s just part of life.” BZZZT. No, that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s the easy part.
I’m talking about being full of shit when you’re in your element. It’s the most pervasive part of your affliction — the shit that you don’t smell anymore, because unlike the masks you sometimes put on and take off, this is running through your heart, mind, and soul, all day and night.
It’s easier to see it in other people than in ourselves. Let’s pick on an easy example: someone who devotes his personal education and career to being an expert on finance. To me, he’s obviously doing one long and meaningless dance around something that, in the end, is a.) is going to all whittle down to one barely-interesting little number at the bottom of a sheet of paper, and b.) is going to be distributed among his survivors (whose love for him was always genuine, of course) because he’ll be too busy feeding the subterranean ecology to spend it on anything meaningful.
Okay, so, speck in one eye, board in the other, what about all the crap that I ramble about? So I know which musical intervals approximate what whole number pitch ratios, and how much they’re off by. How does that help me? Even as a songwriter, how the fuck does it help me? How does it benefit anyone? The information itself is just noise. Maybe occasionally useful, but even so, for the few people that ever need to do so, they can look it up on a table.
But it’s worse than that. It’s not my occasional tangent into mathematical factoids; it’s my constant endless rambling about what I want to do with my life, and how far along I am on this, and what little thing I worked on today, and so on. It’s fine that I do those projects, and useful that I have such patience for the mundane details while doing the work, but when it comes time to talk about them, what do they mean?? It would probably take me a while (and some humbling) to even comprehend what the big picture looks like, because of how ingrained my habits are of throwing jargon around to describe some obscure tweak I just made. And using that jargon as ___ to ward off the Big Questions nipping at my feet. (And then complaining that people “don’t get it”, because it’s easier than admitting I don’t get it myself.)
Videoblog #1 doesn’t answer The Questions (I put that in bold type to avoid the flood of demands from people wanting “their ten minutes back”), but it gets me to the point where I’m at least asking them, and that’s a a start:
Now, granted, I’m still kicking the residual gunk from this cold, and I’m not at full energy or clarity. For that matter, it may be downright hypocritical to post such a shitty video. But why not begin this process now, since the past few weeks of zero productivity kind of gives me a blank slate.
Eagle-eyed viewers may spot mice at play in the background. Notice how totally not full of shit they are.
How about you? What would you kick your own ass for babbling about way too much, and what point are you trying to get to? You know all that clever and careful editing we do on our art and music, to get rid of all the stuff that was helpful in the working stages, but superfluous in the final presentation… could you benefit from applying some of that ruthless editing to your own everyday inner dialogue?
