Whether or not you like Kanye West, you gotta give the man some credit for giving us hope that we’ll never hear from 50 Cent ever again.

I don’t buy a lot of new music anymore (I mainly buy old records for the record) but I’ll buy the new Kanye West album and well, it’s a bonus that I don’t need to hear another “Candy Shop”.

As an old man would say “50 Cent, more like ‘Shitty Cent!’”.

Har har.

A one-act play

Patrick: You know, if I have a notebook, I never have a place to store it.
Mitch: Don’t know what to tell you man.
Patrick:…because if I put it in my front shirt pocket, it makes my nipple hurt.
Mitch: I don’t think you’re supposed to use it.
Patrick: My nipple?!
Mitch: No, the shirt pocket.
Patrick: Oh….

So you know how stupid people make a big fuss about the “secularization of Christmas”? Apparently “Happy Holidays” is not a nice enough greeting — we must constantly remind the person we are saying it to that it is, in fact, the time of the year we celebrate Christmas. Never mind that scholars date Jesus’ birth way outside the “Christmas Season”.

Well, we have that whole can of worms and I suggest we turn this can of worms into a double-wide.

You know what steams me up? When people call that greatest holiday of them all, Independence Day, The 4th of July. Have we forgotten the meaning of this day? Pretty soon our kids won’t even know what we’re celebrating! Pretty soon the world will have no recollection of rich drunk white men that didn’t like paying taxes!

I say we call up Bill O’Reilly and make a big stink about this. I think we can make quite a controversy out of this. You heard it here first.

Sometimes you need to wipe the slate clean in your life.

Sometimes you need a new beginning for things.

Our minds and lives have a tendency to collect and categorize things. There are these people out there that can live in a messy place, decide to move on, and then just throw out their entire life and skip town. Or so I’m told. It’s tough to tell if any of your friends are this way under the scrutiny of close inspection. Sometimes you need to step back from your life and others’ lives to gain any perspective and for your eyes to focus.

Stepping away from writing and reading avidly for the last couple years has allowed me to do that. There’s all sorts of mantras and clichés to put this in perspective, but I’ll spare you those.

More than anything, what’s changed is my audience. I have no audience to speak of as far as peers go. Don’t get me wrong, I have friends, but friends by and large are not the audience for my “art.” There are rare occasions, but just like our own vision blurs when looking at our own life closely, it also blurs when looking at others’. Arguments turn our vision red when in close and those disagreements seem petty and pointed far away. It’s funny how embarrassed we are or how unrelenting we can be about backing down up close but it’s easy to look back and laugh — forfeit those arguments. We blame our age, our depression, our drunken stupor, our genetics but rarely ourselves. Political history doesn’t move in a straight line and neither does our own history. There are ups and downs, triumphs and failures, Bushes and Carters. It’s not always inexperience, sometimes it’s just having too much ambition or too much pride to back down and step away from the situation when it’s really the most rational thing to do.

Artists always have audience problems. It’s not the right people or people misinterpret what’s being said or enemies or acquaintances take the expression as attacks against who they are. So it’s sometimes better friends take no interest in their art. And hell, sometimes it just isn’t that interesting who’s there every step of the creative process (which is sometimes just living life for certain people).

Art doesn’t need to be a painting or writing or music, though. We’re all good at certain things and there is an art to that. Whether it’s fixing cars or cooking or listening, it’s art nevertheless. It’s not that we take these things for granted, it’s just that friends don’t pay that close of attention to academic pursuits in neighboring lives.

That’s the good thing about good friends that observe your art. They might still check it out even if your last year of writing was total garbage. Observing the highlight reel makes it seem like it’s been a bright year.