Passion. Do we have it?

Not in money. Or anything else with any kind of long-term driving force. Listen, as wide wide a world of sports this big blue ball is, how can anyone justify that kind of energy? Then again, sliced bread can’t have been a first draft, which forces us to coin a phrase (since sliced bread is pretty simple, pretty neat, and must have been the product of someone’s fevered brain): why? Well, no good reasons. Ever. Maybe three bad ones though, in our case, if you’ll allow us to pitchfork you on our own idiomatic indecision. First, we like words and words like us enough to fool around with when we’re not in another relationship. Talent is a different matter, but the mass that is our home tongue is a joy in its self-contained mockery and to have that friends-with-benefits connection and blow it on not so occasional ephemeral snark and elevated book-of-the-text outbursts feels like a real waste. Second, we’re not grounded. Do with that as thou wilt as long as it doesn’t make noise, but the kind of effort required to take words and write them down and post them to a place kind of of our own development, and the cauldron of associated drudge necessitated by a scheduled system, keeps us from buying a raft of beanbag chairs and living the life of Leto II. Third, doing this makes us nauseous in ways that were once the province only of spinach, bologna, and meatloaf (the loaf of meat, not the man who in death was named Robert Paulson, a meaty loaf but not meatloaf). Hopefully that’s bounced you by this point if you planned on bouncing, and for that we could not blame you, because here follows an exercise: a further development On Why.

The idiom is use it or lose it. Consider plastic for a moment and come back when you’ve removed the language’s head from its bloated ass. We can wait. English is dumb, certain, stuffy, hesitant, and free all at the same chaotic wormhole dumping ground of a time. It’s just and only fun, if what you want is not a job or acceptance or to feel connected to people around you who don’t share your learning path. We love the feel of it in our brain, of breaking rules to prove we can or find out we didn’t because like the first sun chamber there aren’t any. And that’s one reason to share, in public. The structures of this sand soup we communicate in are so fluid as to be the residual unfortunate ectoplasm of their own ghost (or, if you prefer, the contents of an ebolic bed pan; you’re welcome). That brings us joy, and hiding said is a whole problematic shame in ours, the culture that invented the VPN. Sure, it’s pointless, but sometimes they tell us that’s the point and to be fair sometimes that seems just barely logical. We’re all apes: what’s the point of eating onions? And yet you’re all doing it all the time and pretending it’s fun. It’s a streak of masochism that directly translates to the infinite whirl that is communicative consumption- and creation, let none fool, whether by wool or leg-pull or old lamp or hunt for the great snipe or wild goose, is consumption of the first order. Wasteful, too, if we don’t at least put it in the recycling bin. So there: put it, mentally, in whichever of those ridiculous bins it goes in but at least do that, for us, so that together we’ve made this pointmore (you’ll get there). When the aliens come at least they’ll be confused. Isn’t that the ultimate efficiency of purpose?

That being said, a more important consideration is our complete lack of grounding. We operate on a plane so far removed from practicality they might as well call it the Earhart. Because. She flew a lot of airplanes. Except for that one time when she faked her own death and moved to Iowa, making a living as a crop-duster and running a notorious speakeasy inside a corn silo. Generations passed through with no idea, and all it took was a legend and a fake nose, and when she died her last words were “Suckers.” See? Anyway the effect of doing this, of making things and making things available for consumption helps us keep the skin of our socks adjacent to our particular marble. We need that- significantly more, we suspect, than you will ever need anything we ever make. Our work will never be the root thematic element in your wedding or your cousin’s birthday party but giving it to you is the root thematic element in our Thursdays. Putting that all together and to good use is probably important for our outlook. Does that mean we are indifferent to the broader reception? We plead the fifth here, but not because the answer is yes or because we understand the Bill of Rights: more like we are uncomfortable living in a Twistian reality begging for the thin soup of workhouse appreciation. Also we feel much cooler pretending.

But to that end, does this matter? Is it good? We know what we think which is exactly why giving any of it any air makes us want to show the atmosphere what our gastrointestinal workings have done at the midpoint with the fruit of their labors. We think it’s probably true that to art is to self-loathe, self-deceive, or both, but that awareness of the root pathology doesn’t help us push the acid back down the chute. What it does do is make us sort of mad, and so as a kind of mutinous symbolic finger we’ve decided to give our weakened, brittle skin the what-for. That’s where you come in, being the strawman target in the triage of our self-respect. Whether you benefit or not, we have, and our theft of your processors for however short a time is a direct banana bag to the perpetual hangover of our Vegas blackout morning after. We don’t like fear, and we sort of feel like attacking it. But only, y’know, on our terms. To question the efficacy of that would be fair but then again what are you, a doctor?

Take that cynicism. Take that you passionless old fox. Reasoned into the dust with justification and obfuscation aplenty. Some may question us. Why not therapy? Why not drugs? Why not a trip to the cliff houses of the Anasazi to puncture our ego and make us feel again the sense of small awe inherent to the clean slate of childhood? And to them we say, out loud: “Shrug”. We have no better answers than those herein provided and you’ll just have to trust us when we tell you that it bothers us at least as much as it bothers you. And as for efficacy? Well- do we feel like a waster? As a London slum urchin peeing on a legally graffitoed wall. Do we feel earthed by the significance of our recent choices? No, obviously not. But of all the things it seems the most noble to have tried. And do we feel like vomiting? Well, like the man said… let me sleep on it.