Seeing as how it’s already late in the evening here on AdamJCohen.com and nobody’s posted, I’m guessing today was my day to start things off for the guests posts. Some might say it’s a bit irresponsible of me to forget to do something I’d promised to do, but anybody who knows me is secretly applauding the fact that I didn’t forget outright! I’ve always had a problem with commitment, in that I commit to things and then think my job is finished.
So who am I? The name’s Goob (seriously) and I run a personal site and a freebie site among countless others. You know that friend of yours who always has way too much on his plate and starts 10 new projects every month when he doesn’t even have time to finish one of them? Yep, that’s me.
Adam and I have known each other for about two years, despite not having met in person yet. Hopefully we’ll be able to remedy that far sooner than later. When he asked if I would mind doing a guest post on his site, I couldn’t help but be a little honored. Sure, we’re not talking about the New York Times calling me up and asking if I’d write a cover story for them, but still. To be asked to write something is always an honor.
As I sat down to type up a post, I hit the proverbial brick wall in record time. (quick side note, I think we can stop calling it a “proverbial” brick wall. It’s just as freaking frustrating and annoying as a real one.) What the heck was I going to write about? I’ve run Shyzer for over 5 1/2 years, which leads to a lot of topics already having been covered. When you think about what I said earlier regarding my absolute lack of commitment to anything else in my life, it puts the site a little more in context. How in the world have I kept writing for so long?
Then I got to thinking about my writing itself. Newsflash: it’s not that good. Sometimes my writing comes off as if a drunk five year old was at the keyboard. I tend to ramble and create run-on sentences, which then helps to fuel my desire to use too many commas, kinda like right now. I think prepositions are perfect for ending my sentences with. And at the very least, I absolutely love starting my sentences with a conjunction.
So why in the heck do I even bother to write?
I can’t speak for Adam or anybody else beyond myself, but deep down it’s because I love attention. There, I said it. For me, writing isn’t quite the altruistic activity that I wish I could claim it was. It’s me creating something out of thin air and then feeding my ego when people read it. Whenever I fill out a job application, I write in that I’m a recovering comment addict. It’s like crack. Every few hours, I’m checking my sites to see if somebody’s commented, what they’ve said, what they think, on and on and on…
You know, maybe that’s why no company every returns my calls!
A while back, I stumbled across a site chock full of awesomeness. Started during the writer’s strike last year, it’s aptly titled Why We Write and for the most part featured pieces by the writers behind well known TV shows and movies. Some of the newer stuff has been written by average Joe’s, which I tend to ironically not find interesting at all, but the earlier stuff on the site is well worth a read.
One of my favorite pieces is by Bill Lawrence, the creator of Scrubs. “I don’t write because I couldn’t do anything else. I’m a bright guy, I could hold down a number of jobs. I could run a hat shop. I don’t love writing. Nobody does - it’s worse than fishing.” - Haha, so true.
How about the guy who writes Jeopardy questions for a living. Or answers, whatever. I didn’t even know Jeopardy had any writers. I never even bothered to question where all those answers came from every day. For all I knew, Alex Trebek just made them up on the spot every night. Maybe Will Ferrell was covertly feeding him the answers. Turns out it’s nine guys whose only task is collectively coming up with 14,030 answers every year. There are far worse ways to make a living in my book.
My absolute favorite, though, is Damon Lindelof’s entry. It’s not often that I have an epiphanic moment. Learning that there were other people out there who thought the same way I did was such a moment though. So there are other people out there whose imaginative mind takes over far more often than it should? Sweeeeeeet.
And that’s when I realized that I don’t write for the feedback. I write because I love to create things. I write because if I didn’t have such an outlet, I’d most likely be the crazy guy on the street corner wearing a tinfoil hat and screaming about the approaching apocalypse. I write because it pleases me.
One of my biggest influences is a man named Ze Frank, who has created hundreds of different games, videos, and written posts on his site over the years. I once read that he taught a class where he forced his students to create something every day for a month. They bitched and they moaned, but after 31 days everybody had created 31 objects, be it poems, songs, arts & crafts knickknacks, or what have you. Not a single person failed to thank him for the experience.
There are so many things we could complain about these days. People are too demanding, too wasteful, too ignorant, too… well the list goes on and on. But I think one thing we rarely realize is how complacent we’ve become with the limits on our creativity.
We get up, go to work, come home, grab a fast meal from McDonalds, and veg out in front of the TV for a while before starting the process all over at again. That’s no way to live and while I might take the alternative to the extreme (no day job! No home! No responsibilities! Woooo!), there’s still a part of me that can’t help but feel we should all create a little more in our daily lives. Even if it’s just office supplies attacking us.
And just like that, the brick wall lies smashed in a million pieces at your feet. At least until tomorrow, at which point I’ll begin the battle all over again. Hmmm, maybe my life isn’t that different than everybody else’s after all.
Oh, crap, I forgot Adam told y’all I’m supposed to be funny. This post hasn’t been hilarious at all, especially for my standards. Way too much reflection and self analyzing! Ok, um…poop. Heh heh heh, that word is always funny. Until (hopefully) next time, folks!
