Mind Your Own God Damn Business

I have a friend who was introduced to me through a mutual acquaintance. A few weeks after the friend and I met, he was telling our acquaintance that he thought I was kind of funny. Our acquaintance somberly explained to him that I wasn’t, in fact, funny, but that I just quoted funny lines from movies. I had a similar conversation with this acquaintance once where he explained to me that I only liked the music that I liked because the media told me that it was cool. Nobody told him to listen to the bands he enjoyed, he explained to me.

Give me a moment. I need to cool down after remembering that conversation.

Boys, boys! There's plenty of me to go around!

I have to disagree with the music argument. First of all, you NEVER question my love of Pantera, because my love for Pantera is as pure as fresh fallen snow. Second of all, if I based my music preferences on what was most likely to make me look cool, well, let’s just say that I bet on the wrong horse. A few weeks ago, I was driving home from the gym in a minivan singing along as loudly as I could to “Chains of Love” by Erasure, which I was blasting. In a brief moment of self awareness, I looked over at the car next to me, which had a hot (and what I’m guessing was college-age) girl in the driver’s seat, watching me. The look on her face could have meant a lot of things. She could have, as a mental exercise, been trying to figure out if there was any possible combination of actions that I could perform that would ever make her willing to sleep with me after seeing this (The verdict: No). She could have been alarmed at the fact that what appeared to be a clearly mentally handicapped man who wasn’t even wearing his safety helmet had somehow gotten his hands on a minivan. I suppose that it’s even possible that there was someone slaughtering a pig somewhere behind me, she was actually watching that and I mistakenly thought she was looking at me. Any one of those scenarios would have explained the look on her face. I’m not a psychic. I don’t know what was going through her head. I can say, with a fair degree of certainty, however, that “This is a man who’s choice of music makes him seem cooler in my eyes” was not going through her head. Worse, this is not a one-time event. The music and location change, but I do this to myself about once a month.

But what about the accusation that I’m not actually funny, but just a clever mimic who recites funny lines from mass media? I want to say no.

On the other hand, maybe I do.

You’ve probably seen the video of Bill O’Reilly freaking out when he was part of Inside Edition. If you haven’t, here it is:

As much as I want to use that as fodder to accuse O’Reilly of being a crazy asshole, that’s probably not fair. If you wanted to find a one minute clip of me being nuts sometime over the past twenty years, you could probably do it fairly easily. Either way, I was watching some studio footage of Dillinger Escape Plan that they put up to plug their new album. It’s mostly not that exciting if you don’t care about the album, but then I found these two clips:

You can skip to about the 30 second point for this one.

Notice any similarities between that and the clip of O’Reilly? Me too.

Now check out this one, starting at about the 50 second mark:

See where this is going? As near as I can tell, Dillinger Escape Plan has decided that any time you perform something at a high level, you are “Doin’ it live”.

Is this something that I missed out on or something they came up with on their own? Either way, I am on board. I’ve decided since seeing those videos that from here on out, any time that I do something awesome, I will refer to it as “Doin’ it live”. I’ve also decided that if I were ever to form a band, the clip of O’Reilly would be an awesome way to start a set. It will keep ramping up in intensity, until he screams “FUCK IT! WE’LL DO IT LIVE!”, at which point the band starts rocking.

Awesome.

All of this makes me wonder: did that acquaintance have a point? Do I just take the things I find funny, assimilate them recite them until I don’t think they’re funny anymore and then repeat the cycle? I’m not self aware enough to give an accurate answer to that, but I have three thoughts.

The first is that maybe he’s right. I certainly do it some of the time, as evidenced by the fact that I consciously made a decision last night to start saying “doin’ it live” instead of “demonstrating advanced mastery”. I also took a look at my last five blog posts, and their subjects are Valentine’s Day, video games, “floating”, Avatar and then video games again. I’m not breaking any new ground by writing about those subjects, or providing an especially unique perspective on them either.

The second is that I’m suspicious that everyone does a lot of this all of the time. There are six billion people on the planet, and billions more that came before the ones that are alive now. It’s pretty fucking challenging to come up with something that no one else ever has, or that isn’t at least derivative of something else. Unless you’re on the cutting edge of your field, most of your life probably consists of using information you assimilated from other sources.

It's not going to be easy to come up with an appropriate quote from Ghost Dad that will get me out of this situation.

Third, I don’t think it’s a constant thing, because it seems like it would be kind of challenging to purely quote other things. I’m trying to imagine having a conversation with someone where I have to frantically come up with an appropriate, topical line from a movie every time it’s my turn to talk, and I imagine it being really hard.

Fourth, since he knows the cheap, bush league methods I use in a desperate attempt to make people like me, it implies that it would be just as easy for him to sucker a few people into a few cheap laughs by reciting funny things like a parrot too; apparently, he just has too much integrity to stoop to my level and rip other people off to get a chuckle.

Either way…who really gives a fuck? I mostly brought it up in the first place because I needed an excuse to talk about the new slang I’ve decided to add to my vocabulary.

That’s how you fucking do it live.