Aaron vs. Slanguage

Here's something Lynda Barry would call autobifictionography.

There are two siblings, a younger brother and an older brother, and they live in wholly different worlds. I guess, following that old axiom that we look for ways to distinguish ourselves, the younger brother obsesses with the physical and the older brother with the mental. One hangs with what some people would consider street toughs - I'd call them ordinary people - one hangs with theater students, writers: the bohemian street toughs, if you will.

Where the story diverges is that the older brother has chosen to become a writer: spends each day saturating in the language of every writer, today from Borges to Moody, yesterday from Cervantes to Theroux. And yet he is surrounded, everywhere he goes, by the prevailance and indefatiguable nature of slang. He finds himself so appalled by the malediction of the English that he cannot help but jump on the bandwagon to communicate. His own words - erudite, well-thought out, often prolix - they don't serve any intelligible purpose. They're not, to use the proper term, "real" enough.

[A short digression onto the terminology of "real," a word the younger brother uses with increasing inaccuracy. It begins with the asseration that there is one specific worldview (and only one). It ends with the conclusion that the older brother is so far distanced from this "real" world that he has created, for all purposes, a functioning fantasy world which despite serving as his reality, is no more than the bitter stuff of dreams after a rude awakening. The older brother researches "real" - by which I mean he looks it up at www.dictionary.com - and assumes the younger brother means that he is living a life of pretense, falsehood, or affectation - a world that is artificial and spurious. The older brother is not necessarily sure that the younger brother understands all this terminology (though he understands that he is quite smart), so he keeps his mouth shut.

What would it be like, he - the older brother - wonders, to live in this other world, his - the younger brother - world? Can two realities operate on the same plane without a constant grinding friction, a gradual wearing away of the seams, an abnegation of self sacrificed to the painful truth that there is in fact no reality at all?]

He coins the term "honeydew" for "pussy" which is in fact already slang for "vagina." He tries to get his friends to accept the British usage of "good on you." He starts saying "what's good" and attempts to respond with "no d" an online double entendre for both "no doubt" and the positive assertation of moving one's head up and down in a vertical line more than once. He even jokes around with the phrase "PCRN" - politely chortling right now - and the counterpart "PGRN" (guffawing). None of this actually changes his own reality or those of the people around him, none of this brings him closer to his younger brother. Most of it is in fact embarassing. These two worlds have no relationship to one another, and hence the two brothers have no relationship.

This would be a sad reality to face, were there such a thing as reality. God would shed tears, were there such a thing as God. These two brothers would mourn the loss, if either of them existed, at one time, in this world, together.

CURRENT MUSIC VIDEO:
"Do You Realize (Version 2)," by The Flaming Lips. They really just need a great director, because most of their videos look like shit. They just sound so good.

RANDOM PLUG:
I know I posted a link to their music video from The 'Bu, but Jeanette sent me back to them for Awesometown and now I learn that the good ol' boys of The Lonely Island will all be involved with SNL: Andy as cast, Yorma and Akiva as writers. All you really need in this world is a camera and a sense of humor. That really just boils down to eyes and ears.

boo-yeah to:
Ok Go and Death Cab For Cutie have both just put out amazing CDs. But the shout-out goes to Arlene, who has read the comic book Will and I have been working on and, with a few succinct words of praise, encouraged us to continue with that. If you or I are lucky enough to have children one day: always praise them.

MY LIFE (an update):
My manuscript stands at 147 pages right now. I am deep in revision mode. I will be submitting said manuscript to Iowa State (and through them George Saunders) in exactly four weeks. You can see samples of stuff I'm working on at www.writefight.org. Therefore, I'm learning how to work through my weaknesses. In order to address my need to produce at least a thousand-and-one words a day, expect to see posts here on a more regular basis. If anybody out there exists long enough to sneak a peek, that is.