On Nothing

If you are looking to wax philosophy, I will fail you.

If you are eager for topical debate, I will shrug at your outbursts.

If you are hoping to swap facts and figures, I won’t have much to offer.

I like to talk about nothing. Always have. I would rather start every sentence not knowing how I was going to finish it. I would rather laugh at the crazy rhetoricals which result. I would rather pose questions than spew knowledge.

What’s so great about conversations on nothing is you never know where it will lead you. That unknown path can often times lead to my favorite activity – laughter. With political or topical discussion the route is predetermined. You know the issues that will be breached, because everyone else has laid these conversations out for us. There will be pointless agreement or disagreement that certainly won’t result in laughter. Well, not the fun laughter at least, maybe the awkward one-sided kind.

Maybe I like nothing because starting with nothing needs imagination to become something. Or maybe I just plain don’t got the smarts in me.

This nothingness has been on my mind quite a bit. I realized this vast nothingness has consumed more than just my speech. It has reached into the spirit of my writing and is slowly encroaching on the art my hands produce.

I write about everyday nothingness because I refuse to write about life-isms. I have no right to tell anyone how to live their life and won’t try. I won’t pretend I have things figured out. Along with the life-isms that pepper FAR too many blogs out there, I am also resistant to the life-hard-isms. When it comes down to it, we all have the same problems and I know I don’t want to be reminded of mine through someone’s daily writing. Comfort in relate ability is one thing. Listening to an ongoing internal nagging narrative is another. If I succumb to either of these in my writing on a frequent basis, will someone PLEASE tell me to shut my whining yap! But I will cover my ass here and say, please don’t throw that back into my face as hypocritical if I have the rare bad day blues. I’m having a bad day - be cool, man!

Tangent! What I wanted to get at is that most of my writing is based on a 15 second blip of life that day. They are all freeze frames of my life. They are nothing special. Not weighted with significance. This blog has become a collection of my simple pleasures.

I will say, somewhat off topically, that if I ever write a book (which is something I never, ever considered until recently) I will title it the same as this entry. On Nothing. So don’t go stealing it you thieving bastards!

Lastly, my art has gotten a dose of this nothingness too. The nothing in my drawings has always been apparent in my play with negative space. I like the idea of drawing as little as I can and the emptiness fills in the rest of the lines for me. That nothing becomes something when the brain automatically connects two lines that lay on the same plane. Or maybe I am just lazy and want to draw as little as possible. That is probably best for all observing parties.

Ok, I am sufficiently bored by my own nothing, it has become too much of a something. I am moving onto rousing my sleeping leg with a brief polka interlude towards my dirtied dishes.