Words for My Enjoyment

Words For Your Enjoyment: No Topic Post

December 8th, 2006

I’d like to welcome all of you to Friday.

Now that you’re here, make yourself at home. Kick your feet up. But your head back. Grab a cola or a diet cola or one of those freak-of-nature diet colas without caffeine. Look back fondly on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and wonder where all the time went. And come here for yet another edition of “Words For Your Enjoyment” — where you supply the idea, we use it, and the Iraq war ends because of it.

And today, my friends, is so different you won’t want to miss it.

WFME maurauding reader Merel writes: “I want to ask whether this week for Words For Your Enjoyment, could you write a post that has no topic? I reckon you should be able to manage that!!!”

Alas, Merel — it’s time I admit to something that I consider to be one of my biggest personality flaws. That flaw, it seems, is that no matter what I write, talk about or communicate via smoke signal — I am always talking about something. That no matter how hard I try, no matter how hard I squint my eyes and clench my jaw — something always comes out of my head. That sadly, even though you heap tons of confidence my way in feeling confident in my skills to write about absolutely nothing — it’s something I don’t think I have ever been capable of.

I can’t write nothing to save my life.

In fact, when I’ve often strived to write that “nothing post” for the sake of being clever, it’s always blown up in my face. In fact, over the course of the last three years, I attempted to write a post with zero topic and zero substance (without just posting a blank page) and ended up with posts that addressed things like:

• Eye twitching & the reluctant single man and how such twitching could potentially communicate the wrong emotion on a date where there’s no chemistry.
• The universe and it’s emptiness and how lonely and cold it makes me feel and how being cold makes me wish I had a fluffy bathrobe that felt nice that I didn’t have to steal from a hotel in order to get it.
• Coral, and why people think it falls under the category of “art”.
• The amount I’d write on a blank check from a billionaire, and what number wouldn’t make me look like a greedy sonuvabitch.
• The game of “Duck, Duck, Goose” and how the person who invented it probably had a slew of friends and family who thought it was the stupidest idea ever and that it would be awfully amusing to have the inventor alive today so he could see that, yes, the game of “Duck, Duck, Goose” is probably the stupidest idea ever.
• Zero: It has FOUR letters in it. Why can’t it have zero instead? Why couldn’t it just be ” “, without the quotes — just the empty space in between?
• How the answer to the question, “What’s wrong?” results in the answer “Nothing” more than 95% of the time, according to a double-blind survey I took part in with my family, by consistently seeming pissed and then having only one answer to supply upon being asked if anything was wrong.
• White: The Non-Color Color
• Hunting & Gathering: Learning how to use a spear in the naughts.
• Will a spider that not’s harming you, that you go out of your way to kill, somehow contact it’s brethren from the beyond in order to ensure revenge is enacted upon my house? Because it feels that way to me.

So, as you can see — there really is no possible way to write a post that has no topic. The lack of a topic becomes the topic. A lack of subject line, becomes the subject line. A post about nothing, becomes a hit television show on NBC, resulting in millions of dollars and racist bigots.

Like I said — nothing is always something.

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[From the editor: I have officially gone insane. Not Merel. The repeating of a post (although different in content, somewhat) is a sign of more than just distraction. Apologies across the board. My mind is mush.]

Posted under WFYE. |