As someone in the second half of his 62nd year, I’m appalled by the fact that the Internet has disinterred and revived a dreadful adolescent folly of my youth: the convinction that some people — a lucky few — are preternaturally interesting. Their slightest word is very manna. An email from B— or E— makes my day — even though very, very few days are thus made. In frequent fits of Stalinist self-denunciation, I convince myself that, in this way or in that way, I have gravely offended these Olympians. It’s entirely likely.

What makes it all so much worse is knowing that, if Facebook (and the Internet, &c &c) had existed when I was a teenager, I’d just about rule the world by now. I’d have insulted so many people in so many unforgettable, zingily toxic ways that money would be all that I could hold on to. This is why I spend hours wondering if I have offended B— and E—. When I was twenty, I was capable of amazing offensiveness, calmly and deliberately reminding victims (and informing bystanders) of disadvantageous revelations made in unguarded moments, twisting them for maximal linguistic éclat. Forty years have slowed me down, but I am still capable of the occasional appalling “observation.”

My mother (who was not my mother) used to say that I liked to tear the wings off of flies. For years, I kidded myself by dismissing this as her dimwitted resentment of my intellectual dispassion. But she was right: I do like something that I’m not supposed to like. Although I feel sincere when I say that I hate to see people suffer, this is the case only when I myself haven’t caused the suffering with the mocking troll that lives beneath my tongue, and that surprises and shocks me no less than it does everyone else.  

You’d probably like to hear an example of my “wit.” Almost immediately, though, you’d wish that you hadn’t. It isn’t so much a matter of bons mots as it is one of completely unscrupulous license: it isn’t what I’ve said, it’s that I even thought it, much less said it. All that you need to know now is that my way of honoring the remarkable people whom I meet is, all too often, to mortify them with my Mortemart wit.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 11:59 pm. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.