A mandate for the masses

This is a number of years in the making. Have you all noticed a common characteristic among the recently popular movies of Troy, the Lord of the Rings and Gladiator (and I can go on...) Something about the way they talk. A proto-Shakespearean dialogue which distances reality leaving us in the story world.

But this isn't good. I recently learned that this way of speaking is referred to as "Stage English." Now if you ask me this is an oxymoron. The stage, or acting, is all about style. The way to express human experience without improvising. Well, improvising, but not the actual words. Stage English is designed completely to lack style and emotion, to distance the speaker from the audience. Yes, we get the fact that you exist in a fictional world. Is this a world without human experience? Without emotions? Apparently. All you do is fight for a religious good.

And apparently the American public cares about a world such as this.

Honestly, I don't have the time anymore.

So what precisely makes this English so bad? First, nobody speaks this way. No it's not American nor British, nor is it ancient. It's a joke; and every line delivered, once you have this mentality, is worse than the last. English vowels have style (there are 32 distinct vowel sounds in English--more than any other common language), but Stage English tries to eliminate many them. English uses a glottal stop, but due to its imprecision, it goes unused in stage English.

Secondly, everybody speaks as if he's Yoda. You're not Yoda. Tolerate any more sujects gratuitously added to the end of sentences I won't. And most importantly, "shall" should only be used in the first person. Never again shall the evil of Mordor plague our peoples.

And my third point is that the entire idea behind these movies is tthat they be legendary. And the way they try to achieve this seems to be only through stage English. The charachers are distanced from the audience just because they speak through a falsely official tongue. If I were to hear someone speak this way, be he a student or my boss or my professor, I'd seriously have to ask him if he were drunk. This language is a deception to the people. None of us should stand for easy answers or a false presentation of the official, the important, or the good. We should determine on our own what's important, then seek actors who can present it in the most genuinely human demeanor.

I noticed that some of the lines are just great to hear, because they're powerful or noteworthy or sound bite meriting. A simple solution is to listen to Tom Waits, because he's said it all before, with more style than any of these clowns.

New Year's Resolution

Today I finally turned 21. And I think it's the perfect time for me to start my weed rebellion. When I was younger there was an ethos behind smoking weed. Perhaps it was just the fact that we weren't supposed to. Perhaps it was that older kids liked it. Much more likely is that the effect is completely unexpected. Indeed I spent years trying to figure out exactly what it did. But that's just it, I think I do know what it does, and I do expect it. I believe that most people think it "feels good" in the simplest sense. Of course I don't enjoy it in the way most people do. I was always in it for the intellectual experience. One more change in perspective.

But that's all over, and it has been replaced by extreme paranoia. Now, I'm not so scared of the 5-0 nor my parents (I've figured out ways to escape those (mainly being in Montreal)), it lies embedded a little deeper. And thanks to the brain-mapping power of weed I was able to express it eloquently: paranoia = overmonitoring.

So what is monitoring? We've decided that human beings are the only creatures who are truly free. That is, we have free will. And this is because we are able to monitor our own thoughts, and change them when they don't seem to work. And the part that truly makes us free, unlike animals, is that, recursively, we can monitor any monitor, ad infinitum. One can always take a step back from whatever one's thinking.

But I don't want to monitor all the time. I mean, having to think so much is a curse. The only escape is when thinking is productive. Monitoring is fundamental to thinking, but elements that are not reflective are of utmost importance.

Imagine trying to write a haiku in the style of Jack Kerouac. An improv, a joke, a sample of writing. As he directed: "Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog." Write one word and then write another before you think. The true interior monologue. Then you mess it all up by thinking, "Boulders and pastries -- wow that's a great start... oh shit I'm thinking oh shit what would be good now, something that has to do with boulders or pastries or sounds like pastries how about pastoral junkies and..." ...and you lost it. (Note that each "oh shit" is one step backward, one kernal of popping corn). This is precisely what weed does: I reflect more. I become more of a fox than a hedgehog. But to the point of being bad. To the point of being useless.

Then, couple that with my new-found adult life. The one where I'm paranoid ever sober moment I have anyway of trying to find a good job and a good school and a girlfriend and how I always say things that are borderline dirtbag to every girl I know. That's what overmonitoring does: it stymies productive thinking on how to solve these problems while leaving me at the one point where I actually feel the anxiety of the job search, the apprehension of university, and the unmitigated shame of being a dirtbag. With no hope of taking a step forward.

That's paranoia; that's overmonitoring. That's why I'm quitting smoking phattie blunts.

New Thing

Welcome to my first blog. In a purely selfish and conceited move, I'm going to attempt to explore all the thoughts and musings I can muster. I will show you what it's like to think like me. I will present promogulations you never thought existed. I will practice.