What The Hell Are You Talking About?

Tonight should be fun. This afternoon has been boring. I’m trying to shave. It’s not going well. Only I could turn such a mundane task into a life-or-death struggle. Hopefully I won’t look like a complete jackass, or kill myself during the grooming process.

If you’re seeing this for the first time, allow me to welcome you to a week-long rant against all things. Each day this week is being devoted to observations of mine that I find irksome. You know those annoying things that continue to pop up in your life no matter how hard you try to distance yourself from the object of your scorn? This is where I complain about them, in the hopes that you will comment of your own on a related subject. Who makes you ask yourself:

What the hell are you talking about? – People who continue to speak — at great length — about a topic that either makes no sense, or is completely irrelevant.

- Joe Morgan: You’re the worst baseball analyst I’ve ever listened to. Just because you’re a hall-of-famer doesn’t mean your abilities extend to public speaking. A lot of times, I’m not sure if you’re speaking English.

- 18th Century Lit. Professor: “I don’t care if you went to college for fourteen years to earn your PHD, but decided to become a professor because directing was “too cutthroat” for you. That’s the kind of story only a pathetic knave would invent to justify his own lack of artistic talent. You, my good sir, are a pompous, Mormon closet-case prick who’s favorite topic for discourse is yourself. I signed up for a class that, “Traces developments in literature and criticism through the long eighteenth century with particular attention paid to historical influences, cultural change, and the development of literary forms, especially the rise of the novel.” That is what I expected to learn, not a series of plays read aloud in your own foppish fuck-me-in-the-ass voice.” – Me, in a letter to him, 11-2004

- Greta Van Susteren: Is that your normal voice? It sounds like you’re choking on a potato and trying to speak over it instead of dislodging it. I’m glad you got really worked up about the girl who was killed in Aruba. I think you single-handedly ruined any chance of ever resolving that tragedy with your brand of vigilante journalism.

- Efrim Menuck: When I saw you in 2003 you launched into this diatribe before your encore, where you espoused enlightening ideas such as, “It’s this constant thing when you talk to certain people, and you say anything, and they’re like, ‘Well, it’s very easy to criticize. It’s very easy to complain, but what solutions…’ you know? ‘What are you offering?’ So here is one possible answer, right? We all of us go to the hardware store and buy a hammer. All of us. All of us. And we walk or drive or fly to Washington — the capital — and we go into the Pentagon, or the White House, or both, and we bring both those buildings down brick-by-fucking-brick-by-fucking-brick. And don’t no one go to work. And don’t no one go to school. And don’t no one shop. And don’t no one drive.” Way to use your platform to say something rational and insightful, buddy. Thank God you’re not touring anymore, I can’t imagine how your mental capacity has regressed these past four years. Though I wonder, if you did tour, what would you say is your newest possible solution for our country’s crisis?

- Destroyer: I like a few of your tunes, I just don’t understand what you’re singing or why you sing it in such a homosexual voice.

- Kevin Smith: I remember a couple years ago watching “An Evening With Kevin Smith” when it was on HBO, and aside from the fact that I noticed a cute girl I went to high school with in the audience, the experience marked the commencement of my disgust for the guy. I went from respect to disgust in the span of eight hours, or however long that masturbatory “chat” lasted. And then he came out with a second DVD. As if he didn’t drop enough names in the first one, or blame other people for the not-success of any of his movies since Clerks. This is less of a “What the hell are you talking about?” And more of a “Why the hell are you still talking?”