The Best Offense Is A Bad Pun

It's been a while since I've written one of these. Hokey smokes, it’s been since Halloween!

There are some mundane reasons - work, holidays, whatever. But there's a larger reason, and as I came to realize over the last couple of days, writing about not writing is kind of at the essence of what META-SPIEL is all about.

What is this crazy reason which warrants special attention all on its own?

I didn't want to offend anyone.

Back on my radio show GOAT-SPIEL, one of the frequent gags was to flip the microphone on and say something like this:

“If you’re Hindu, and you’re offended, call now!”

It was a play on the idea that if someone somehow did manage to get offended, they might call in and express offense. Well, we didn’t really want to offend anyone. But we wanted to act like we might be offending people? It was all ridiculous, but in retrospect, it may actually have been way ahead of its time. We’re in heady times for offending people, or maybe offending people, or for people just not liking something and claiming offense… really all of the above.

I write things on Facebook from time to time which might very well tick some people off, most pointedly about politics. Thing is, I'm pretty sure none of the people liable to take (or feign) offense are reading any of it.

Over time I've evolved a particular writing style. A huge amount of the raw writing I have done has been in email form, usually being sent to some listserv or another. Further in the past that might have been music-oriented listservs. For a long time it was one of a series of listservs for the Green Party, at the state or national level.

As that trailed off, I was fortunate enough to be able to write some pieces for Gapers Block (RIP), but most of my writing was simply removed from email to Facebook. Facebook is a lousy medium for such things, but, well, that's where the writing went anyway. My tone changed though. On Green Party listservs, my audience was quite static, and I had no anticipation that messages would wind up going beyond the confines of a given list. On Facebook, the audience is actually less static. I've got hundreds of "friends" I rarely interact with, but any of whom might well pop up responding to a post. And there's always the possibility of someone wanting to share a post.

My writing at this point tends to be very stream-of-conscious, while also somewhat conversational. I'm comfortable putting myself into a narrative that isn't especially about me, and I find that many of the other writers I quite like do the same thing. I write for friends and family, but my line of thinking is that anyone who might want to read qualifies as "friends and family" too. I also like to try and encapsulate the things I write. For example I wrote a post about Trump and Iran this week that was kind of like an article, with the introduction tied back in to the conclusion.

The other thing though, and the thing which ends me back editing more than anything else, is the desire not to offend. I don't want to say the wrong thing and disturb you. I also don't want to write something where 95% of what I put out there is ignored and we're focusing on 5% which is a minor component of things, which maybe didn't need to be there in the first place. So while I make arguments that you might not agree with, I make a point to write in a way where I'm not somehow calling YOU out. (Unless you're my dad? Ahh, but that's a story for another time.)

Well, I had something I wanted to write about. I wrote quite a bit. And I revised. And I rewrote. And I kept feeling like I was being some combination of trite, cliche, and offensive. I found that as I tried to be less trite, it seemed like I was just careening more into possibly offending someone. I couldn't get past the duality. And I let it slide for a couple of days, then a week, then a couple of weeks, and now it's been a couple of months, I think, and because I let THAT slide, I didn't get back to writing anything else, because the thing I’d started was in the way of anything else.

I am finally going to go back and write what I intended to write. And I am going to accept the possibility of offending someone. Because I think it's important enough to write about, even if some people might find it trite or redundant. It's something I have frequently struggled with but have found it to be very hard to talk about.

Nothing I've written up to this point is remotely offensive (unless you're my dad? (or… Hindu?), and yet I had the urge here to wipe most of the paragraphs away and start over, that this wasn't leading anywhere useful, that I was just wandering into the trite. In part this is a side effect of the stream-of-conscious style. If writing is like entering a maze, where you're following the turns, looking for paths, trying to make progress, and then you're suddenly blocked, you get the idea that you have to backtrack a lot and get to where you can start progressing again.

I wonder if I could have handled - if I could now handle - being a journalist or someone whose income is based on writing, on needing to produce something daily. My god, would I like to be able to do that, and yet I've never really wrapped my head around how anyone besides a standard reporter can think their way through what their job is. How the hell can you actually BE a columnist? How do you keep generating ideas like that? How do you handle knowing that so much of what you've produced is necessarily mediocre, because there's no way you can always produce at a high level? (Have I finally offended someone else here?)

To accomplish such a thing, I think my style would have to evolve again, and I'd have to be more willing to risk offending people. I just don't think I could constantly squeeze out the edginess, in a constant fret over how people would take individual sentences, without it draining me. I'd have to allow myself to take more chances, to be more free-flowing. But, I've felt that way about a lot more than writing too. I've become super risk-averse over time, and I don't think that's always been to my advantage. Maybe some time I’ll go into that too.

For now, lucky readers, look for another META-SPIEL coming your way much sooner than it took this one to come to you. And brace yourself, for I will be trying to write about something fraught with peril: Dead Singers.

In the meantime, imagine the phone call I'm going to get from my dad, asking what the hell I'm talking about. And let me just add: It's nice to be able to have conversations like that, and I hope you too are lucky enough to be able to do so.