“Listen, I’ve done a thousand of these interviews. What I’m about to say, I am saying because I like you and I think you need to hear it.”
“Ok.”
“You ask me if I’ve ever had my heart broken. How would you answer that question?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I would say yes, and probably tell the story. The most interesting one, anyway.”
“Do you think I would find that story interesting?”
“No, but that’s why I’m interviewing you - you are you, and I think celebrity makes everything interesting, even when it’s mundane, because people like to find out celebrities are like them.”
“Of course, but are you writing for that audience? I don’t want to talk to those people. If I am the one being interviewed, I am the one talking to people. I want them to give a shit, and I can’t tell a story they won’t give a shit about. Have you ever told a boring story? You get half way through and you know it’s boring, but you’re committed, so you finish it and it turns out exactly as you expected only worse because you told the second half self-consciously. I am tired of being put in this position by interviewers, and I think you know it’s wrong too. You are a smart man. You should stop.”
“I should stop interviewing?”
“If that is what it takes. But no, you should not stop interviewing, you should stop asking questions you don’t want to know the answer to. Who are you asking these questions for? I don’t believe you care whether I’ve ever had my heart broken. What’s more, I think you can understand that everyone’s answer to that question would be essentially the same.”
“How do you mean?”
“How about this: imagine for a moment that I keep this photograph in my wallet, of a beautiful woman. And when the typical interviewer asks me this ridiculous question, I pull out this photo and I tell a beautiful story about the most stunning, kind, gentle woman that ever lived, and this story ends with a tragically short but excruciatingly painful battle with pancreatic cancer. My story, it has more words than the one the teenage boy tells about the girl who broke up with him because he didn’t have a car. But it is the same story because it is the truest heartbreak either of us has ever known. It is the worst version of the story of lost love that we could tell.”
“But clearly one of these stories will have more impact-“
“On who? On someone who lost his young wife to cancer? On the teenage boy’s mother? Listen. You are spinning your wheels trying to expose things about me that will make people forget things about themselves. And on some of them it will work, but the ones I want to reach - the ones you should want to reach - they understand that we feel nothing until we feel something, and the fact that I can take a dump in a box and someone will find a way to mass market it does not make the story of my worst heartbreak any more valid than the poor boy whose greatest love was lost over the lack of a silly material possession. So you ask me if I’ve ever been heartbroken? Brother, I invented heartbreak. So did you. Write that down.”
St. Patrick’s Church, San Francisco. I’m so in love with this photo, taken with my phone in the dead of night. It’s all, like, Nosferatu and shit.
“Changing my porn name from Rod Babyarm to Manly Ramirez. Look for my new movie, “Dominican Me Horny!”.” — twitter
[video]
“When someone’s rude about asking you to do something, take a deep breath, remember they’re human too, and then fucking do it or so help me.” — twitter
“The best thing about having children is blaming farts on them. Just kidding, that’s what pets are for. There’s nothing good about children.” — twitter
“Help someone go mad with power today.” — twitter
This Sween character is a manifestation of a phenomenon related to hyper-local fame or notoriety. Having no well-known online persona outside of Twitter like Mr. Mann (see the prior entry), Sween nevertheless maintains an enormous presence on Twitter, with approximately forty-five million followers1. The sparse information available indicates that Mr. Sween may in fact be Canadian2, which may render my conclusions completely moot given that they will exist (necessarily so) outside of their nascent continental contextry.
The central conceit of the “tweet” in this case is the idea that Ninjas, which are black-clad martial artists who employ tactics of stealth to both defeat their opponents and avoid waking people up at night when they go to the bathroom, could partake in some of the worldy pleasures of the non-Ninja world (e.g., crunchy snacks) if that non-Ninja world consisted entirely of people wearing noise-canceling headphones3. Henceforth we refer to this world as Headphone-World.
But in a world like Headphone-World, with the rules of the game so casually muted4, what of the Ninja? With no need for audible stealth have we not removed from him or her his or her very Ninjaness, reducing him or her to merely one-dimensional specialists with hearing that is, relative to the headphone world, extremely acute? One would have to imagine that in Headphone-World a Ninja would be able to find better-paying work, leaving the vocation heretofore known as “Ninja Work”5 to be done by merely well-trained yeomen6. One wonders if there exists room in this crazy world at all for the highly trained specialist.
After all, Charles Barkley would defeat me one-on-one in a game ofbasketball regardless of whether I were blindfolded, correct?
Therefore once the layers of humor are peeled away from this “tweet”, one sees at its heart a portrayal of a bland crypto-utopian future against which many American capitalist objectivists have (rightly or wrongly) struggled. I will be paying particular attention to Mr. Sween in the future, as I find his ideas both challenging and rewarding.
1 Est.
2 I found Canadia in my one visit there in 1961 to be mildly unsettling, like chocolate Alka-Seltzer on an empty stomach.
3 Forgive, if you can, the built-in misunderstanding about how noise-canceling headphones actually function and pretend instead that they function like perfect earplugs. This absurd naivete on the part of the author, in fact, lends weight to the overall sense of whimsy this “tweet” presents, and so therefore must be considered an intentional oversight.
4 You see what I did there, right?
5 Ninja payscale information on the internet is highly suspect.
6 “Yeoman” in this case being someone with a two-year Associates Degree from a school within five miles of an accredited university.
Dear Mr. Starky,
I read with great interest your treatise on the “Ninjas / Crunchy Snacks / Noise-Canceling Headphones” document prepared by Mr. Sween. However, I found the exposition deficient and I have some comments I would like to share with you.
Foremost, it seems one could contend that in a world where all noise is blocked from potential listeners, the Ninja is simply a ballet dancer who wears black, can smell and hear an enemy heart rate increase at a hundred meters, and is positively anal about cleaning up after herself. While it is clear that the “humor” flailed at in the scenario presented by the author is at least partially based on the idea that the Ninja becomes mostly irrelevant in this noiseless fantasy world, it must be supposed that the Ninja does indeed have some purpose, for they are still labeled as Ninjas despite the luxury of disregard for sonic disturbance. We are left, then, to assume that the remaining stealthy features of the typical Ninja, they being unparalleled dexterity, extensive dark wardrobe, the senses of an adrenaline-doped owl and intolerance for disorder, remain quite important to their success as the only thing we understand them to be.
In light of these unstated but implicit facts clumsily imposed upon us by the author, we can eventually arrive at a clear and crippling conclusion: the Ninja dare not consume crunchy snacks regardless of their noise factor. Crunchy snacks generate substantial debris. This is a well-understood fact of the crunchy snack. Debris poses obvious problems for the Ninja in maintaining invisibility as well as in avoiding leaving a lasting trace. Furthermore, excess carbohydrates and fats are the two things that would head any nutritionist’s list of things to avoid if one is aiming to maintain ideal body and brain function. Soft whole grain breads and perhaps even light cheeses could be understandable for their other benefits; chips and crackers, however, are obviously out of the question.
The ignorance of the author’s argument is ghastly. As the foremost expert on the subject of Advanced Sparse-Tree Social Penis Systems, I would urge you to consider updating your article on Mr. Sween’s offering to reflect that the suppositions intended to expose humor are drastically incomplete, and that the statement is, therefore, Not Funny.
In highest esteem,
Weselec.