I used to dread questions about favourites. This anxiety came down to a spiral of overthinking. Or could it have been the fear of certain foods growing a grudge and trying to kill me for not putting them on a pedestal (open your eyes! choking?!).
As a kid, you are forced to pick favourites a lot because it’s a very easy way to condense a child into a nice, little ball of examinable words. Because of this, I developed a generic response to pretty much any “favourite” interrogation which was primed and ready to brush off anything that could possible be asked.
However, the problem still hung in the air. I didn’t want to reply that “Sonia O’Sullivan is OF COURSE the person that inspires ME the most. Did you hear that she once ran so hard that she broke every single bone in her foot? Huh? Did you? She finished the race and only noticed it THEN”. Despite my feelings, I still sucked it up. I valued a concrete self over authenticity because anything else is just kind of scary.
It only hit me recently that those problems have just silently melted away. That downward spiral still stands tall but I realised that I had quietly been picking up things that resonate with me as the years went by. It felt like I was discovering a whole person who had been built while my back was turned. I have a favourite colour. I know what foods I love. I have people who inspire me.
I wanted to take this blog to celebrate the people who inspire me and to celebrate the me that became inspired. People who set my creativity and passion into motion.
Prime Movers.
I MAY have stolen this word from Aristotle but he can’t exactly send me a cease and desist letter now, can he? This word seems to fit. Aristotle thought that their needed to be something that set everything into motion (God). I think of these inspiring people as the spark that sets others going.
A nice Canadian man who I just might be quite smitten with can be a prime mover. That Canadian is a YouTuber known as Northernlion (Ryan LeTourneau). This factory (gifted human form) churns out a new episode of the game Binding of Isaac every single day. Naturally (or unnaturally), he’s become so mechanically skilled that he’s simply able to split his mind into two. One half gets the chore of playing the game while, the other half, fucks off and spreads sometimes coherent wisdom in 40 minute chunks.
The fact that he has transcended the game means that he’s able to go on tangents about sandwiches (this really does need emphasis because of how often it happens), how we should live our lives and how fish and chips should most certainly not to be eaten with your hands.
Tangent: This is almost required because of who the focus is on here. I simply want to state that it is disturbing on an emotional level to find out that people eat fish and chips with their hands. I had planned on weighing in on something MORE absurd that Northernlion has backed up in the past (the “10% of your dick” argument comes to mind), however, this is too personal not to handle.
Listen.
Knives and forks were not invented as something to be TRIFLED with. They were invented for keeping your hands clean when eating food. Yes, you can eat bread with your hands. Yes, there’s no issue with you eating pizza with your hands. These foods are NOT disastrously messy. The Messy Principle backs me up when I say that you should never eat fish and chips with your hands. In my mind, it would be exactly the same as eating fucking bolognese with your sweaty mitts.
THE FISH IS AN OILY, DEEP-FRIED PIECE OF MEAT.
You may ask “What about ribs, mister? They are quite messy to handle“. I’m going to apologise to everyone on my side of the argument for what I’m going to say next but I feel this too strongly to keep it to myself. I do not think ribs should be eaten with the hands. ANY food that gets your hands dirty is knife and fork territory. THE EFFORT OF USING A KNIFE AND FORK IS LESS EFFORT THAN CLEANING YOUR HANDS.
They hated Jesus because He told them the truth.
But I digress.
Northernlion is the most qualified BACKGROUND NOISE I have ever found. Not evert washing machines has a Biology major. There’s a whole subsection of the people who watch him who do so just to fall asleep. At first, I wasn’t sure how anyone could live with that. My opinion on this has changed the longer I’ve listened to him. He’s morphed into a comforting presence that almost acts like a nice, warm blanket when things are going wrong.
What do I look up to in this man? His dedication to a constant which he puts his all into and his sense of purity and authenticity. It’s strange to say but I feel like I know this man more than some of the shifting, changing people in my life.
Who else but Branson Reese? The man who coughed up a wonderful monstrosity of a comic every single day for an entire year at midnight on the dot without exception.
These aren’t simply comics. My friend says that art should be uncomfortable for the viewer but I don’t think that extends into the realm of sheer, physical discomfort. The first comic I saw actually made me squirm in my chair. It included a small, imp of a man completely naked. Since then, I’ve become quite familiar with Branson’s interpretation of the male genitalia but I wouldn’t dare spoil your first viewing by trying to capture it here.
What I love about his comics is that the only constraint placed on them is the four panels. In every other aspect, chaos reigns supreme. Day by day, a new world springs into existence with new rules. You’re thrown into a place where numbers argue at funerals or t-shirts have feeling and brim with life. You desperately try and reorientate yourself within four panels before the punchline comes in and smacks you upside the head.
The comic could contain no words or be absolutely polluted with dialogue. Branson has such a talent of drowning the final box in hilarity (and, yes, words also) that I actually take physical, orgasmic pleasure from zooming in on things with my phone now. Pavlovian is definitely the word.
Here is my desperate attempt to do a comic. Naturally, it must include an imp and have a plot revolving around a man’s junk. My ability to only draw trashcans will never hold me back so help me GOD.
Steven Suptic is someone else that I have a lot of respect for.
He was a Minecraft YouTuber. I can only NOW see how that would tug at someone’s sanity and sense of worth. Honestly, I was too busy clapping along and laughing about how his skin had a UNIBROW! I swear it was a big, funny unibrow!
Most people get trapped in this career/hole because of how sticky Minecraft fans are but Steve decided to REINVENT and escape.
He, however, made a ROOKIE mistake here by turning his channel right back around into something he grew to hate again.
This selfish man wanted something that didn’t sap his soul so he attempted the mythical second upheaval. To add to the courage needed for this, he reinvented into something that simply didn’t exist. I think the word for that is invented. His name for it is alternative lifestyle and it’s the funniest and most real thing I’ve ever been a part of. I’m not exactly sure where all the authenticity tumbles from because of the absurd ways the characters act BUT the show oozes it. It only hit me that I was painfully invested when a season finale is thrown out of nowhere and all of a sudden a character is dead and everything is serious and, oh god, am I crying? Thanks for breaking my cold emotionless mask, jerk.
Why is Steve inspiring? He had the courage to not sit and wallow somewhere he’s unhappy. He worked his ass off for something that he actually wanted and I feel second-hand ecstatic and stressed from all the success that’s busting his door down
A dramatic description of Alfredo
I saw him. I saw Alfredo. All I know is that H. P. Lovecraft would have placed this firmly in the “mere mortals should not view this” camp.
There seemed to be a tarpaulin pulled taut over this quivering mass. It was a Ben Sherman shirt stretched past its limit. I made a mental note to ruffle it if anything happened. The mass rose to meet me; it’s edges sagging and stretching as it sloshed upright. A flurry of hands found their respective armholes and eagerly stretched out to meet the visitor.
“Ah, a fucked up little, worm in MY tower I smell W-O-R-M”.
It was hard to tell where the sound was coming from; it erupted almost from the ground underneath. He looked quite similar to Sebulba if his jewish nose had grown thrice in size and then migrated to another part of the “body”. Is that TOO racy? Thankfully, the protrusion has Jew Nose engraved on it in scrawling, childlike handwriting so I’m safe from scrutiny. Other parts of his body are labelled as well. One of his arms is labelled “Leo is the best star sign” while another simply has “CAMERA”. The only splash of colour is the yellow bulk that hangs off his longest and most spindly arm. A closer look shows me that the entire arm has LIVESTRONG bands plastering it. It’s odd but now that I look at him, he does have some Lance Armstrong features. Two very strong, EPO-filled legs hold his massive, dripping weight two inches off the floor. I move in for a closer look at the green tendrils floating around his back but they retract and a snarl comes from above. His head emerges from a flap of hooded skin and he cries in a guttural tone:
“Smokers are my CROAKERS from the heaven down there”. This heaven apparently lies where his crotch would be.
I stumble back.
My most critical crush will always be the 16th century man, Montaigne. Since I can’t send little notes to him across the class, I’ll have to settle on this post. I only discovered him after I started my blog but I like to pretend he was my reason for starting.
The real reason is less noble. Less refined. My friends and I had the original thought that we were just so wacky that it was a crime that there wasn’t a sitcom based around us already. I decided to lay out the characters and take matters into my own hands (Memes, Cringe and Lightening Mc Queen).
The story goes that, after countless tragedies, Montaigne withdrew from society and decided to try and capture what it was like to BE HIM. It took me a while to realise that I wanted my blogs to emulate what Montaigne had tried to do. His way of capturing his essence was a TOME called the “Essays” which has made him “word immortal”. It has none of the perks of being actually immortal BUT it’s a nice, little concept that he might have enjoyed with real immortality. Should have brewed that elixir like the rest of us, buddy.
Successfully capturing yourself involves more than a big, clunky bear trap (the jury is out on whether that would actually SLOW DOWN the process?). Montaigne would constantly be agonising over his different streams of thought and writing down thoughts as soon as they hit him. Within this massive tome, you can find out about his favourite fruit (melon), how his dogs ears twitch when he sleeps and how he managed to live with the death of his best friend. The more posts I do, the more I want to reveal about my authentic self. This is for entirely selfish reasons. In the far flung future, maybe you would be able to accurately string together a picture of me. I’ll leave the task of what to do with picture up to future generations but it would be really sweet of them if they could hang it up in a nice spot!
deepsarchasm 