The Brain Dump

8-13-24

Welcome to THE EDGE

I've toyed with different concepts for writing exercises and I've hit an early rut. I don't publish content very regularly and sometimes have a prompt that sounds good, but then ends up cratering a paragraph in. I've actually spent several days staring at the desktop and wondering why I thought that prompt was a good idea. Just to make it easier on me, I'm typing straight off the cuff. It's time to get fuckin' meta.

I've decided to think out loud for a bit and consider the concept of blogging itself. Specifically, the most important part: THE EDGE. All I need to do is brainstorm some less-than-conventional (I mean EDGY) gimmicks that would be practical and maybe even funny. The hard part will be when I find out that millions of other people had the exact same ideas and have already executed them better than me. I tell myself I'm volunteering; I'm shitting up the internet with bad writing so good writers are more visible. You're welcome.

Booze-o-hol(?)

I'll get the obvious and most conventional idea out of the way: drunk. This one sounds amazing because I paid attention in high school for a good part of it. I've read what alcoholic writers pump out, but I know "it's the player, not the shoes", so to speak. If it were the shoes, I'd have already turned out to be a regular L. Ron Hubbard. I think this one would actually be practical to a degree. I spend a lot of my time wracking my brain for things to write about. Alcohol inspires you to do all sorts of dumb bullshit. Aside from the humiliation, I can crank out something appropriate for the occasion, no problem. Humiliation is just a bonus.

One of my favorite podcasts used to do drunk shows back in the day. Back in the golden era of Sick and Wrong Podcast (i.e., the Lance Wackerle era), it was a tradition to do a multi-hour Christmas podcast and they got hammered off egg nog. Well, now that I think of it, they were hammered for a lot of their shows, but whatever. The point is: this is a very low effort thing for me to do and although it requires money, it is fairly minimal in comparison to dumber things I've spent money on.

You could even get super weird with it. Like, drink American whiskey and try to write like a stereotypical cowboy. Maybe something like drinking wine and using as much elevated diction as possible. There are tons of possibilities to consider. All I need is to be lazy enough to want to do it and have access to some booze.

Innawoods

FML another conventional one. Everybody does it. This is the place Michael Landon and Henry David Thoreau were inspired by. I like camping and wandering around in the woods, so it seems like a natural fit. I don't know how I'd make that extreme, though. I mean, the obvious answer is to add the booze to being in the woods and BAM, a new post devoid of meaningful content! However, I'd like to try something that I would actually be comfortable doing alone.

Lots of people sit outside and play with their laptops; that's nothing special. But what if I let someone borrow my laptop for a day, return it to me, then go out in the woods and try to type something up before the battery dies. Bro, I know that's so hardcore. Here's where shit really gets out of hand. Maybe I also have to upload it in the woods, too. Oh SHIIIIIIII... But really, maybe just actually typing in nature would be an improvement. The real problem I think I haven't addressed is the fact that "getting some fresh air" isn't that EDGY.

Throwing in the Towel

Being an edgelord is really hard and I don't think I have the mindset for it. I also don't know how to do any cool flips or anything, so I'll never be able to write doing that. I think this whole exercise clearly indicates the level of edge is so low that my first instinct is to take the very first chance I get and go right to:

EDGE = ALCOHOLISM