An Intriguing Discovery
While out for dinner with friends, I make it a point not to listen too closely to anything anybody is saying. I find this helpful for many reasons; firstly, of course, it gives me that much more time in which to prepare what I intend to say next. Secondly, I have never seen any evidence that my friends are remotely as interesting as I am. Consequently, until I am in a position in my life to purchase new, better friends, I am comfortable enough using my fall-back strategy, which is to contemplate the many fascinating things I could say while nodding at whoever happens to be talking. I suspect most people converse in this manner. This makes that rarest of beasts—someone who listens—a precious commodity, and a difficult to procure one at that, since most listeners are far too dull to be found out easily. While the rest of us walk through life with our mouths wide open to the elements, those few listeners among our ranks tend to be somewhat difficult to find, given their irksome insistence on not broadcasting their every thought at anyone within earshot. Plus, and I’ll point this out again, they tend to be very boring. Yes, they might point to the quiet dignity they exude with their mysteriousness. But this doesn’t change the fact that, because they have the irritating trait of reminding you of something stupid you said years ago, they are immediately suspicious and quick to be avoided. Besides, who has time to seek out quiet loners when there’s so much talking to get in?
I seem to have digressed a fair bit. Let me trace this back: I was with friends, having dinner. One friend, Mike, mentioned something about a blog. I immediately concluded this word to be nonsense and, suspecting Mike of having a stroke, got about the business of ignoring him.
Unfortunately, he kept up with the blog business long enough until I was forced to admit it might actually be a real word. Reluctantly, I stopped talking and tried to focus on his nonsense. This proved too difficult, so I just interrupted him with a loud question, as is my adorable way.
“So it’s like a diary, then?”
“Kind of,” said Mike with the wearying patience of someone who has obviously just explained this while I failed to listen. Note to self: eventually, Mike will have to go. There’s no room in a dictatorship for a back-talker; come the revolution, Mike would have to disappear, and quickly.
“Kind of how?” I continued. “Kind of like it’s exactly like a diary?”
“Well, no,” replied Mike. “You see, a blog is–” and then I lost interest again. Still, an online diary! I had to agree with his unspoken request that I immediately start this blog business myself. I shared his wink-and-a-nod, also-unspoken assertion that readers would be absolutely floored by the nuts and bolts of my day-to-day life. However, it irked me that he was still explaining what a blog was, since I’d gathered the gist. I asked him to stop talking, and of course, with a frown, he did. I didn’t understand the frown. Mike’s got problems, to be honest. Manic depressive, most likely.
But Mike, despite his inner demons, had a very good point. In these, the first fumbling steps of the new millennium, it was perhaps time to begin cataloguing my frankly staggering day-to-day accomplishments. I have, after all, helped shape countless news events over the years; perhaps I owed it to the public to document these exploits for future ages to ponder over and admire. I have also used my considerable power to crush countless people and bed countless more, and this too deserves recording. In short, I am fascinating. I envy you, the reader, for the journey into which you now embark.
This is my first ever attempt at “writing,” so I hope you’ll bear with me if it seems at times that I can’t properly formulate thoughts. A life spent loudly speaking at people has unfortunately atrophied my literary skills. When I first sat down to put fingers to keyboard, in fact, I realized to my confusion that I had forgotten what letters were supposed to do. I was fully aware that they composed words in some way, of course; but the baffling nature of how they did this confounded me at every turn. After forty minutes of uninterrupted typing, the only results of my efforts were twelve dense pages of lowercase q’s and ampersands.
Luckily, my second attempt proved far more fruitful. This time I simply talked at a mirror that I pretended was someone I wasn’t listening to, while a talented ghostwriter named Jenny something (her name is frankly irrelevant to my narrative) typed my voice out onto a computing machine into “blog” format. The results of these dictations are the body of the text you now read. I hope you will be rewarded for your effort, as I was, with a series of words. Words that, when joined together in ways I can’t begin to fathom, form salient and intelligible sentences.