4 intellectuals < 3
When I write these, I feel that I'm speaking to the masses, and frankly, I wish that I was. I think we all want to be heard. I think of it like a movie where someone is writing an anonymous article to the paper, and then they find love or something along those lines. It’s the sort of feeling that you never know who could read it and where it might go. If I write what I feel down, how far-reaching is that? There’s something inside me that wants to hear the coliseum's reaction. I want to know if I'm correct on a larger scale. All the time, I hope what I'm writing is funny or relatable. Am I funny and relatable? Am I deep, or am I just pretending to be? Is "deep" something I'd like to be called? Maybe "pensive" or "thoughtful" is better. I’ve always wanted someone to call me prolific. That is one of the coolest things that you can be called, in my opinion. "Deep" is kind of an absurd, nebulous term we attach to things we think are for intelligent people. I think "deep" is sort of this term people like to use that means “for smart people.” But saying "deep" or "profound" or something like that sort of pulls the pretension out of it. I'm not sure if I can articulate that idea correctly, but it’s pretty irritating. I think it’s like when someone is talking about a movie, and then they say, "Oh, I love that film." To you, they’re asserting at that moment that they’re operating on a different scale than you or that they understand things better than your obtuse view on cinema because they’re using a different word than you. That's what it sounds like to me when someone says that something was really deep. “You know, it may not be for the layman like you.” That sort of thing. I think a lot of people have this funny way of assuming that most people don't get movies like Inception or something similar. Because they needed to explain it to their mom, and they completely comprehend the whole thing with the top and all the other little details, they’ve just made the leap to deep thinking. Maybe Christopher Nolan is just good at making us feel smart because he’s good at explaining complicated ideas really well. I think we all make the mistake of thinking that when we understand something really intricate, that makes us really smart. But I think that mostly it just shows how good that person was at explaining. Some people have a knack for articulating feelings we’ve all had in just a few words. I think that is truly profound! Then we run into these people who get sort of addicted to feeling smart. People who only enjoy intellectual content and all that. I worry if that’s me. Am I addicted to the feeling of understanding hard topics because they were explained well? I think some people are. Then our intellectual friends start to think that if we don't like "smart guy" stuff, it’s only because we don’t understand it. And so now we need to watch that movie with them or go back and reread that thing now that they’ve so kindly explained it to us. I know that I'm guilty of this crime. And to be fair as well, sometimes that is the honest truth. In a wider scope of life and such, we’ve an immediate indifference to all nouns that we don’t understand. And I mean person, place, or thing in that sense, but that's probably applicable in another way too. But in this other situation I'm talking about, I think sometimes moms don’t understand Inception because they don’t really care. There probably just wasn’t enough going on that they could latch onto. Why do they need to give a shit about Inception when they have to pay bills and shit? I always think about this part in a Katt Williams special where he’s talking about Michael Jackson saying he loves to climb trees, and Katt’s like, “I don’t climb trees; I got bills and shit.” I think this is an adequate analogy for what I'm trying to say here. Some very reasonable and intelligent people don’t have time to really sink their teeth into deep thinker content, and that’s why they love Marvel or something else—because all they do all day is think, and they just want to turn their brains off or something. I don’t think that’s true for every Marvel fan. Some of them do just love being fed slop with a shovel, and maybe that’s OK too. And so I get aggravated by our intellectuals dogging on what they believe to be the unwashed masses eating their pig slop so happily. People who talk about the plebeians and their slop usually have this tendency to think that our friends and family eat the slop because they haven't the refined palate to take in anything else. It then leads them to believe they’re the ones with the refined palates because they only want that masturbatory experience of intaking refined deep thinker media. They read books and stuff. It’s the same people who read books and then post them while reading a book on their story. Or like a picture of a passage in a book highlighted. I'm sure some of them do it because they sincerely want to share a meaningful excerpt from the text, but a lot of them do it for vanity. While people like me have taken that to a whole other level of making an entire website to gloat about how many books they read. In either case, it is for vanity, I'm afraid. Where’s the line? How do we know we don’t exist for vanity’s sake alone? I use Instagram for that very purpose. I want people to know my girlfriend is beautiful. I want them to see I'm up to things, and I need them to know I'm funny. Is it wrong? Is it vanity? When I call out into the ether and I hear my name called back to me, what am I to do but keep yelling? I'm guilty of all the crimes I just recently named. I do want to be prolific. I want to be a deep thinker. But I want it to be real. I need it to be real. It has to mean something to me and to everyone. When I do something like writing now or making music, I think a part of it is, of course, for the sake of it and the look. But I hope that I'm finding a truer sense of the thing. I think that’s what I hope to find in writing. I want to be sincere, and I need to know if I'm right. In my heart, I think I'm intelligent. I think I’m a deep thinker. Perhaps someday they will say I was prolific. But how’s anyone to know if they’re really smart or profound or prophetic in some way? Am I on the pulse? It feels like I am sometimes. But to be truly sincere, does that mean I should find my way away from the beat? To take my finger off of the pulse and put it up my own ass or something. I’m not sure what any of that really means. But a lot of people I know ask me for advice, and maybe that’s just going to my head, but this is one way to find out. So I pursue this course and hope that I'm not pretending to be something I'm not. Maybe if I was actually smart, I could have said this all in a really concise way, but who’s to say. I’d love to hear what you all think. So please reach out.