Cop-Out

Instead of posting an all new blog entry with all that time-consuming original writing stuff, I think I'll just post a selection of things I've already written and have had a great deal of trouble trying to figure out what to do with. So here you go, first a brief little blurb I wrote while living in the dorms at the University or Nevada, Reno last year:

I live in a dorm room. It’s small and there’s a half bathroom area with a little shaving sink and a mirror. Directly across the room is another, full-length mirror on a door that separates the half-bathroom from the half-bedroom so that when I open the door to make it a whole room, it creates sort of an eternal hallway strung between the two mirrors. I have a tattoo on my back, a two inch exclamation mark juxtaposed between my shoulder blades that’s supposed to be some sort of statement of my love for writing or literature or exuberance or something. It occurred to me recently, while brushing my teeth in my mirror hallway after a hasty shower, that my shoulder blades formed a set of parentheses around my exclamation mark, and the mirrors in front of and behind me formed another set of parentheses around me. I then began to think about writing the thought down, and how I would word it, and what sort of punctuation I would use, at which point it came to mind that my entire world is governed by punctuation.

I can’t decide if that makes my life hollow or just very thoroughly described.

And here's a poem I wrote to a girl in an Education class (repetitively redundant, I know) for future English teachers who incessantly read over my shoulder anytime my fingers even grazed the keyboard of my laptop. One day during class, I was so fed up with her bullcrap that I wrote an entire six-stanza poem comprised of AB couplets while she was reading, completely dedicated to her:

Poem for the Over-the-Shoulder Looker

This is for you,
Oh, snoopiest of snoops.
You who sit idly,
And must stare at the groups,

Of words on my page,
That have nothing to do
(Except in this case),
With you.

This is for you,
The person who keeps,
An eye on my page,
And whose listless brain creeps,

Over all of the things,
Which are privately mine,
Though they be unimportant,
With the passage of time.

This is for you,
The person who smashes,
With great haste and exactness,
My mind’s hidden caches.

And they’re mine, goddammit!
So get out now, get out,
Of these virtual pages,
Before I verbally shout,

At the top of my lungs,
And instead of quietly writing,
Over-the-Shoulder Looker,
I’ll be un-quietly fighting.

When I decided to write about cop-outs, I knew the best way to do it would be to just post a series of writings I'd already done and try and pass them off as a viable blog entry, which they of course cannot be, at least within the subject bounds of this particular blog. Besides all the copying, pasting and reformatting being terribly annoying, this was beginning to feel like one of those clip show episodes sitcoms have when their writers don't want to think of anything new for a week.

A cop-out is the lowest form of bullshitting. Instead of making stuff up to get through requirements the importance of which is somewhat debatable (Core Humanities? Yeah, UNR/TMCC people?), you're actually faking art. You're taking something that's meant to be used as an artistic means and simplifying it for the sake of making it easier. So it made sense to me to use old pieces as my cop-out piece, but its being a cop-out was, while being what seems a pretty good joke to me, pretty crass. So here's something completely new and original (also, a Nudist Nightmares first, wherein I will go against the subject to make a final point on it) limerick:

There once was this guy who sat,

At his computer, growing quite fat,

He blogged all day long,

About how not to live wrong,

And wore the irony like a hat.

So, it has to be pretty evident to anybody reading this that sometimes raw, unadulterated, broadband, hi-definition, organic original stuff can, well, suck in a raw, hi-definition sort of way, but in the end, while the bullshitters and cop-outters are laughing their ways to the bank with fistfuls of money, you can self-righteously sneer toward the First National Bank of the Soul with your tender-loving armfuls of integrity.

Besides, once the American dollar bottoms out, integrity might be worth something!