Monday, October 11, 2004
The Very Hand That Once Spoon-Fed You Will One Day Fork-Feed You, And Grudgingly At That
Woo hoo. So i'm going for the pretentious indie and/or hardcore band song title thing with my title. You know it rocks with the furor of a thousand shrieking vampires riding black winged wolves on rivers of blood into the night. Don't deny it.
Ah, there's nothing like having to write an essay to make you turn in avoidance to writing a post on your long-neglected blog, which you couldn't be bothered to do in any other situation. Really, i'm sorry i haven't been freaking up anyone's day. I've been a freeloader of sorts (freakloader?), freaking up my own day by stringing together bits and pieces of punnery from elsewhere, too selfish to share a scrap or contribute my own paltry freakage to the mix. Unconcerned with the freakitude of anyone's day but my own. Flog me if you must. Frog me if you dare. I'll try to change my ways, to right the wrong, to turn a new leaf, to string as many clichés as i can muster in one sentence.
Today's piece will be a short little piece entitled "A Short Little Piece Entitled 'Trevor.'" Trevor was a freelance writer of haiku and syndicated answering machine messages. He won the occasional obscure award and brought home the occasional bacon, some of which was turkey. His most celebrated work, an ingenious mingling of his duel professions, was the seminal "Haiku for the Unanswered Telephone," which reads,
I am not at home.
Leave your name and number, please
Following the beep.
After the immense popularity of this poem, Trevor overreacted to his newfound fame, failing to channel his success into new and more exploratory work. Instead, he tried to duplicate his one shining moment by writing an entire volume of answering machine haiku and releasing it in installments on his own answering machine. The art community found this simultaneously too experimental and too repetetive (the art community was on some unhealthy combination of Ritalin and Prozac) and Trevor was an outcast.
That's it. That's the whole story. Yeah, i wish it had a happy ending too, but it happens to be a true story and that's just what happened, ok? You think this ending is a cop-out? It's not! It's the truth! Or at least, if not the truth, it's a new and experimental method in the art of storytelling. I call it "Satisfaction through Dissatisfaction." I write an unsatisfying ending, and i'm satisfied with the amount of time it took me to write it. What more could i ask for?
By the way, if you think of any good answering machine haiku, you should post them. We can make it like a contest. Yeah.
Woo hoo. So i'm going for the pretentious indie and/or hardcore band song title thing with my title. You know it rocks with the furor of a thousand shrieking vampires riding black winged wolves on rivers of blood into the night. Don't deny it.
Ah, there's nothing like having to write an essay to make you turn in avoidance to writing a post on your long-neglected blog, which you couldn't be bothered to do in any other situation. Really, i'm sorry i haven't been freaking up anyone's day. I've been a freeloader of sorts (freakloader?), freaking up my own day by stringing together bits and pieces of punnery from elsewhere, too selfish to share a scrap or contribute my own paltry freakage to the mix. Unconcerned with the freakitude of anyone's day but my own. Flog me if you must. Frog me if you dare. I'll try to change my ways, to right the wrong, to turn a new leaf, to string as many clichés as i can muster in one sentence.
Today's piece will be a short little piece entitled "A Short Little Piece Entitled 'Trevor.'" Trevor was a freelance writer of haiku and syndicated answering machine messages. He won the occasional obscure award and brought home the occasional bacon, some of which was turkey. His most celebrated work, an ingenious mingling of his duel professions, was the seminal "Haiku for the Unanswered Telephone," which reads,
I am not at home.
Leave your name and number, please
Following the beep.
After the immense popularity of this poem, Trevor overreacted to his newfound fame, failing to channel his success into new and more exploratory work. Instead, he tried to duplicate his one shining moment by writing an entire volume of answering machine haiku and releasing it in installments on his own answering machine. The art community found this simultaneously too experimental and too repetetive (the art community was on some unhealthy combination of Ritalin and Prozac) and Trevor was an outcast.
That's it. That's the whole story. Yeah, i wish it had a happy ending too, but it happens to be a true story and that's just what happened, ok? You think this ending is a cop-out? It's not! It's the truth! Or at least, if not the truth, it's a new and experimental method in the art of storytelling. I call it "Satisfaction through Dissatisfaction." I write an unsatisfying ending, and i'm satisfied with the amount of time it took me to write it. What more could i ask for?
By the way, if you think of any good answering machine haiku, you should post them. We can make it like a contest. Yeah.
