Act Like You Know: What you know by 40...

... is that sometimes you have to act like you know.

Like I don't know what to write right now.  I have no idea for a topic, no burning desire in my heart that I must express, nothing heavy on my mind that I must confess.  I only have this commitment to write, right now.

So I'm going to act like I know what I'm up to right now, that I planned this post out to seem clueless about what to write so that I could have this kind of meta, existential moment of self-referential clarity about this whole 40 days of writing experiment.  So I can pull the curtain back on my commitment to write everyday and show you that sometimes all I have by way of rationale for writing is this:  Because I said I would.

Well, now I'm three paragraphs in and still don't really have a point.  But I am opening myself up to the possibility of non-linear progression that might meander to a destination.  I am open to this third paragraph being like Seinfeld in its third season, scripting itself aimlessly with technically melodramatic writing performed to hold your attention while the fact that there's nothing actually happening is slipped right under nose like a whiff of absurdity.  It's like free-styling about free-styling and I'm doing it right now.

So wherever this post goes, if it does indeed keep going, we will go there together because I am committed to continuing to write and you are obviously committed to continuing to read.  Even though there might not be some funny twist or a meaningful play on meaning of a happy ending when this post is over, there might be just enough value in the time we are spending together right now, as reader and writer, to make this whole post worthwhile.  And if not, c'est la vie,  que sera, sera, and Domo Arigato.

Well, now, have we really made it to five paragraphs without any purpose to this post?  If we have, then have we wasted our time?  If we haven't wasted our time, is it a waste of time now to keep questioning whether we have or will waste our time if we keep going?  If we decide to keep going, at what point will we have wasted our time?  What are the qualities of wasted time?  Is it dependent on the outcome of the time spent?  Or is it related to the quality of the time spent?  Is Kant right that each word of each sentence of each paragraph of this post is, like the human that created it, an end unto itself? Or, contrastingly, is this Machiavelli's own post, only concerned for its own self-interests in its desire to go on by any and all means? Are both of these questions made irrelevant by the Double Slit experiment,




which proves that this blog post, as essentially a series of electrical pulses that have been converted to radio waves and back to electrical pulses that appear as these words, can behave as both a wave and a particle, able to both be an end and a means at the same time?  And if you aren't willing to click the links and watch the video to find out what I'm talking about, has this whole paragraph been a waste of time?  And if it has been a waste, have we really just finished five paragraphs without any purpose to this post?  If a tree falls in the forest does it startle a bear as it shits in the woods and uses a rabbit for toilet tissue?

Now six paragraphs, being one over the five paragraph structure of a prototypical essay, is a slice of cheese more than the basic hamburger of posts.  So we are really getting to the point where this post better gain some momentum towards a meaning or else we will have a veggie burger of a post:  a very unsatisfying hodgepodge of beans and nuts and bark and stuff that might as well have been barfed up by a tree after it binged on a bunch of burritos and snickers bars and chewed up gum while standing in it's little square of an infinitely linear Manhattan sidewalk.  No offense to veggie burger eaters or Seinfeld writers.


And after seven paragraphs in, I have to ask  What is this, velvet?



Is this Velveeta?  Is the potential of meaning in this post meta, like a post-modern myth of a movie where Eddie Murphy pretends to be a short Jewish man who inspects a lion-head sash worn by James Earl Jones (AKA king Jaffe Joffer of Zamunda) and, being unable to comprehend that the pretend real lion mane could be anything other than a velvet knock-off, asks "what is that, velvet?"  Is this post that weird while not being one fiber of pretend real lion fur as (kind of) funny?  I think not.

Ultimately, this post is an example of what old school hip hop would advise you to do when you don't know what you are doing.  And that would be 'act like you know.'  By 40, and especially if you have gotten to this point in this post, you should know the value of doing just that.  Don't believe me.  Ask Jerry Seinfeld about the 800 million reasons he agrees.

(Closes laptop)