So yesterday I made a comment about being biased against Dave Eggers in the comments of someone’s Google Reader item and BOOM – some total stranger swoops in like Batman and says “shut the fuck up Jeff.”
Whoa, right?
My first thought was that the commenter was Dave Eggers himself (who I’ve done a bit of a rollercoastery thing with: really liking him and respecting the mission statement of McSweeney’s – as a publishing enterprise and not as a pretty much one-joke humor website* – when I first became aware of it, but getting really sick of his incessant egoism very quickly, but then well what can you expect from an author who calls his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and spends a lot of time in said memoir talking about how he tried to ride Judd Winick’s coattails onto MTV because he wanted to be on MTV). But I realized that ‘shut the fuck up jeff’ is not florid and verbose and packed to its gills with a manic plea to see how smart and fucking wordy I am so it couldn’t have been Dave Eggers because he’d have been all, “a comment that siphons ecstatic transport away from the reader with each syllable! Take it into the forest, tie it to a stump and cover your ears as the wood goblins devour it in all their capering majesty!” and I thought about writing a post where Dave Eggers (well, me writing like Dave Eggers), would comment in effusive and vocabulous ways on terrible things but my heart wasn’t really in it, you know, so I’m pulling back the curtain instead to tell you all about the blog post that I almost wrote but didn’t because a stranger was rude to me on the Internet. Besides, how upset can you really get over a dude on the Internet anyway? It’s the Internet after all, and the Internet is not really a place where you go to to have warm feelings about other human beings – warm human feelings are kind of a bonus, even more than they are in real life. It’s like Anonymous – sometimes, you look at them and they’re attacking a mentally ill guy or a twelve year old girl (and I know that Perry is going to be all up in the comments telling me that these people deserve to be attacked by 4chan because they are social poison) and you kind of expect that of them and you go, okay, maybe that’s a little funny but I hate myself for laughing, but then the rest of the time they’re discrediting Scientology or the tea party and you think that maybe you can use hate and misanthropy for social good sometimes. I think this is what makes the handful of legitimate friendships I’ve developed over time with Internet people pretty remarkable, because you kind of walk in the door expecting that everybody else out there is an unrepentant shithead but sometimes you realize that Yoda was right and that there is, in fact, still good in him. Or it.
EDIT: I should probably stop reading Pitchfork Reviews Reviews right before writing posts.
*And full disclosure here, I subscribed to McSweeney’s and Believer for a few years and probably would still read both of them if they weren’t so ungodly expensive. I mean, if Conde Nast can give me Bon Appetit for something like five cents and a wish per issue – and Bon App isn’t just food porn for me because I save those recipes and try to use them – I can’t justify forty-five dollars a year for ten issues of Believer even if the music issue is always really good.
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I propose you title your autobiography – A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius