Oswalt often shows up playing a very wide variety of characters from a
complete goof to a diabolical villain. Seems to be a very busy actor
these days.
On 06/01/2014 08:15 AM, TurquoiseBee turquoi...@yahoo.com
[FairfieldLife] wrote:
The comedian undertakes something that could do all of us here a lot
of good:
Summer is upon us, and I've got a bad case of The Spurts.
I've gone down an internet/Twitter/Facebook rabbit hole and I need to
engineer a summer spent in nothing but humid, skin-to-air reality for
myself. If I don't, I feel like my psyche is going to suffer permanent
slippage.
I'm going to try to keep this short. And this isn't going to be a
diatribe against the Internet or the information age or Twitter or
anything like that. It's going to be a gentle, winking diatribe
against myself, and my ego and its appetites.
I was reading some -- not all -- but some of Camus' THE REBEL. At an
airport, waiting for a flight. And this line hits me like a ton of bricks:
"Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes."
I've become my own tyrant -- Tweeting, and then responding to my own
responses, and then fighting people who disagree with me. Constantly
feeling like I have to have an instant take on things, instead of
taking a breath, and getting as much information as I can about the
world. Or simply listening to the people around me, and watching the
world and picking up its hidden rhythms, which crouch underneath the
micro and the macro. But I've lost sight of them. And it's because of
this -- there's a portal to a shadow planet in my right hand, the size
of a deck of cards, and I can't keep myself from peeling off one card
after another, looking for a rare ace of sensation.
The Spurts: I've aggressively re-wired my own brain to live and die in
a 140 character jungle. I've let my syntax become nothing more than a
carnival barker's ramp-up to a click-able link where I'm trying to
sell something, or promote something, or share something I had no hand
in making.
So -- I'm engineering a summer. From today, June 1st, until Tuesday,
September 2nd. Radio silent. No Twitter, no Facebook. There'll be a
few announcements here and on my Twitter feed -- mostly for shows and
some movies I'm about to appear in -- but I scheduled these to drop
weeks and months from now, without me having to do them on the day.
The chairs are up on the tables, the floor's been swept, and I'm
locking up my tiny, personal online nightclub until the leaves turn
brown. If Chili John's in Burbank can thrive while still closing for
the summer, I ought to do just fine.
I want to de-atrophy the muscles I once had. The ones I used to charge
through books, sprint through films, amble pleasantly through a new
music album or a human conversation. I've lost them -- willingly, mind
you. My fault. Got addicted to the empty endorphins of being online.
So I need to dry out, and remind myself of the deeper tides I used to
be able to swim in -- in pages, and celluloid, and sounds, and people.
Another writer I read some of, before nervously refreshing my Twitter
"@" mentions or updating my e-mail Inbox, was Garret Keizer. An essay
in Harper's from 2010. Luckily, Keizer writes the kind of sentences
that, even in the all-night casino floor of a world we live in now,
can punch through the din like God's gun. The line that stuck with me
was this:
"For fear of becoming dinosaurs we are turned into sheep."
I don't want to be either. But whatever options are left? They're on
the other side of the silence bath I'm about to take.
Have a good, safe, fun summer. It's upon us. Stay cool when it comes down.