JUST WRITE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (4-11-24)

 

      I'm approaching my nine year anniversary writing for this paper, and it has been an absolute joy, for one of us at least. Maybe you read this column with your morning coffee, and that's how you were able to quit coffee. Maybe you read this article to find an intelligent take on things you hadn't thought of before, only to find that I haven't thought of it either. Maybe you line your parrot's cage with it, and I'd like to think that it gives him a chuckle once in a while. Whatever the reason that you read a newspaper, please keep doing it, because that's where ideas are exchanged. And if you don't like any of my ideas, you can exchange them for credit.

     It's only fitting that I would take to writing, based on my SAT scores in high school. In the math section I scored a 425, which is about the same score you would get if you dipped your cat's paws in #2 pencil shavings and let him stroll around the pages of the test looking for other pencils to knock off the desk as he filled in the answers. My verbal score wasn't that much better, but when I wrote an essay in my college application, I was quickly accepted merely to prevent me from ever doing it again.

    Sometimes people will ask a writer where he gets his inspiration. For me, thinking of inane things is what I would normally do anyway. When I look at the crazy world around me, it doesn't take much effort to make it a little crazier. It might be an obscure reference, or a play on words, or some goofy dialogue. I carry a pad around me, and if I think of something that doesn't make much sense I write it down. If I think of something intellectually advanced I just chalk it up to bad luck, and don't bother to write it down. Other times idea output is directly proportional to alcohol input. 

     Many clever things I come up never make it into this column, and you'll just have to take my word that they were clever. Because writing a humor column is a lot like having an argument with a bully; you always think of something REALLY GREAT to say well after the opportunity to use it has passed. Another fertile time for the germination of ideas is in bed at night. Many creative people have expressed the same thing. An observation might wander into my brain looking for a place where it won't be disturbed, but I don't jot it down since it was SO GOOD I'll be able to think of it tomorrow. Will I remember what it was after I fall asleep? In my dreams.

     I'm an avid reader of novels, and that's inspiring enough. I don't read a lot of science fiction because I'm afraid that it might not be fiction. I like murder mysteries; I read them for my health. My health, you ask? Yes, because I know every possible way you might try to kill me, and trust me, you won't get away with it. But most of all I like characters, people who do and say things that make you want to get to know them better.

     It's less strenuous for authors than it used to be because there are more words now. This year alone, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word "influencer" to the language. That's fine, but if I get pulled over for driving under the influence of an influencer, I may be the only one not laughing. Merriam Webster admitted "yeet," which means, well, I have no idea what it means even after I read the definition.

     Dictionaries are SO heavy that we could get rid of a bunch of words and no one would miss them. "Hat box," "clothes pin," "toll call," just put them in the dust bin, along with "dust bin." Words we use all the time but have no good reason why, like "okey dokey," you can deep-six those, too. In fact, you can deep-six "deep-six" as well. 

     I sometimes publish these columns in a blog so that people all over the world can see what Americans are like if they were anything like me, and I've recently been logging hundreds of hits a day from the city-state of Singapore. Either Singaporeans have an unusual sense of humor, or they are somehow using it to create spam or sow seeds of chaos somehow. If that's the case, I amuse myself by thinking that my blog is being open-sourced in searches by their artificial intelligence models. I can't wait to see how that comes out.

     Contrary to the way I am in person, in print I have to strive to offend people as seldom as possible- I try not to say anything too racy, make fun of orange-looking presidents, or religions, races, creeds or things that I don't agree with that almost everyone else agrees with. That doesn't leave much to work with, but if it makes me laugh, I'll find it.

     So thank you for reading, and the thought of nine more years of writing gives me the yeets, and that means more than you could possibly know. Or less, I'm not exactly sure which.