~2,160 words' worth of some ideas i guess i think are worth conveying.

random absurdity vs. decisive rhetorical detours into the implausible
by buttercup mcgillicuddy

this is an essay about 'manipulating people's ideas using written words' and 'the rhetorical usefulness of transforming an abstraction into "a memory", "a historical event", or "a story-telling device"' and 'how i perceive these things to be used for and against "practical living"'.

people read things all of the time but somehow everyone does not read. i do not know why i read. i think my parents taught me how to read things because they 'felt obligated to' and they wanted me to 'have a good future' or something. as a result i am able to read and understand most things. i would say that i can read and understand 95% of the things i see that are in english. i respond to the other 5% of the things that i see in english by either ignoring them because i do not understand what they mean, assuming that i am not meant to understand what they mean and deem them 'absurd' or using a dictionary, thesaurus or the internet to make it so that i understand and can read about or copy similar ideas later.

i don't know how i feel about reading. sometimes it's OK and other times it seems annoying and other times it seems totally fucked. for example reading seems fucked when i have to read a long piece of writing with a lot of words i don't particularly consider 'interesting' or 'relevant to my existence' so as to convince someone who has the ability to grant me 'the privilege' to do what i want that 'i should be able to do' the thing that i want to do like purchasing expensive things, getting a degree in college or having sex with an overly-emotional and uninteresting girl who writes long letters as a way of self-validating. it also seems 'fucking retarded' to me that the current 'world law' regarding language seems to be that 'if there is a nearly infinite number of ways to develop complex communication, then developing "the idea" "the word" and "the word's pronunciation" as three separate systems is the "most-accessible" way to communicate' [via natural selection/american international dominance]. I think that communication would be much more interesting/simple/universally accessible if 'the idea', 'the word' and 'the word's pronunciation' were all the same thing. it seems 'fucking retarded' to me that this isn't how modern communication works, even though i understand 'the evolution of language' and 'written language's origins' pretty well i think.

i don't think i 'read for fun' very much. reading is a way to receive the amount of complex information that you might get when you talk to a person for a long time, but that does not involve having to listen to a person talk. i don't like listening to people talk. i think that listening to people talk involves processing a lot more information than is 'necessary' and allows a higher rate of miscommunication on the part of the talker to be present [via non-verbal social cues and misinterpreted gestures/facial expressions]. i think i prefer to get information from reading because it is consistently the least annoying way of finding out things.

sometimes i read stories because i am bored of my reality.

when i am reading things, what i read influences my brain because i am constantly doing at least one of the following four things subconsciously:

judging the grammar of what i read

forming images in my brain while reading descriptions of places and actions

deriving 'meaning' from what i am reading

remembering things that what i read seems similar to

i don't know if everyone who reads does this while reading. i don't care if everyone does this while reading. this is what my brain does when i read.

if you are a person that can write words and are either regularly rewarded for writing them, regularly threatened/blackmailed into writing them, or just write a lot of them out of boredom and repeatedly refer to a specific topic, do not refer to a specific topic on purpose, or write a lot of ideas in a 'stream of consciousness '-like manner, then you are probably considered 'a writer' by people who think it is OK to call a person 'a writer'. if you are 'a writer' and i have access to your writing through the internet or in a magazine or book or something and am bored enough to not look at things moving then i might read your writing.

if i read your writing i will judge the grammar, form images in my brain while reading descriptions of places and actions, derive 'meaning' from your writing, and remember other things that your writing seems similar to. if your grammar is very precise then i probably won't spend a lot of time judging it and will work hard at the beginning to create a rhythm in my head of what your writing 'sounds like' to my brain when i read it. if 'what your writing sounds like' seems interesting or familiar to me then i am more likely to 'forget that i am reading' and 'really experience your writing'. if i know you in real life or have seen you in videos or on the internet and 'what your writing sounds like' seems similar to 'what you sound like' then i will probably confuse the words with memories or think that i am experiencing something from your perspective. this is the primary reason why i don't 'read for fun' very much i think, because experiencing something from another person's perspective or confusing the words with a memory does not feel 'fun' to me except in very specific instances. sometime it feels fun when the memory or experience is 'fun' but usually it is boring or has something to do with people i don't know and can't relate to. i don't find it fun when i confuse words with a memory that i can't relate to and would like to avoid experiencing this and therefore don't 'read for fun'.

the kinds of experiences i like to have when i read are:

imagining a character experiencing situations that seem 'highly implausible' without the character knowing 'why it is happening'

imagining a character experiencing an emotion that i am familiar with and that i associate with good memories/feelings

remembering an experience from a perspective within a character/narrator's perspective that is communicated in a way that i can relate to but have not 'dissected' myself

imagining a texture, abstraction, or episode that is 'complex' and 'sensual' that i have not imagined or experienced but that seems 'intriguing' without being 'very frightening' or 'unpleasant'

experiencing something from a perspective that sees things through multiple levels of intense sarcasm

i feel like everything before this line was an introduction to the theme stated in the first paragraph.

i feel 78% sure that most 'fantastic ancient literature' that i have read takes itself completely seriously and was written for the purpose of convincing someone to live their life a certain way. i feel like this is not 'what literature is about' or something with respect to the human experience.

though i am not in touch with the psychological processes of homer, the person(s) who wrote the bible, j. r. r. tolkein or other 'epic novelists' who wrote 'fantastic ancient literature', when i read their recounting of highly implausible human experiences it seems like they 'really believed in' what they were writing and prescribed what they saw as 'inherent meaning' to these pieces while trying to convey the ideas in a beautiful or aesthetically intriguing manner. the feeling that i get when i read stories like these is one of 'oppressive subjectivism' or something. like the authors are trying to convince themselves and everyone who reads their work that what happened is absolutely relevant to every human being because of the story's 'inherent moral qualities' and 'objective truth'. this idea is very depressing to me.

i think that when someone writes about fantastic human experiences involving extreme emotions and divergent or conflicting perspectives/experiences that there should be a self-awareness that they, as writers, are subjective human beings and that their way of storytelling is basically only relevant to themselves and people who are willing to accept their perspective of the conflict in the stories. when someone thinks that what they write is 'true' because it seems good or think people can derive 'life-enhancing value' from it, it makes me feel like humanity has a 'problem' with differentiating between 'what is real' and 'abstractions that seem to validate human existence'.

if a writer is self-aware enough of their perspective to acknowledge the potential meaninglessness of their stories, then i think that they create a more extensive framework for justifying 'rhetorically detouring into the highly implausible' because current understanding of 'the human experience' shows that even dementia and hallucinatory episodes are experienced within the subjective realities of our minds and only ideas that are 'concrete' or 'universal' should be taken for granted and communicated as such. i am aware that 'concrete' and 'universal' ideas are subject to the thinking of the general population of humans exposed to certain types of thought within a certain period of time, but i think that 'not taking yourself too seriously' is a sort of transcendent (particularly literary) quality that does not necessarily have to be 'comedic' or 'absurd' in nature and is part of 'practical living' or something.

i think that i am slowly realizing that i 'find fault' with the population of readers expecting 'life-affirming' literature and who 'prescribe unintended meaning' to writer's work. damn. this sort of undoes everything i feel that i said previously.

the theme of this essay is based in the assumption that humanity's capacity for highly implausible abstraction is equally as valid as humanity's ability to rationalize and deconstruct 'seemingly rational' abstractions. the latter kind of abstractions are those which humanity deduces as fundamental byproducts of its desire to 'absolutely' comprehend a ubiquitous reality that exists in spite of and with no 'directly perceivable concern' for humanity or its limited ability for understanding this reality's laws and discernible components exclusively through abstraction, due to its inherent inability to fully disassociate from itself. humanity's capacity for abstraction, however appears not to be limited to abstractions that approach an absolute comprehension of reality and can therefore extend into the seemingly absurd.

writing that uses 'highly implausible' or 'absurd' abstractions for the purpose of creating a perceived pattern of human and extra-human situations with parallel action-reaction properties or 'analogies' (for example, comparing a person who seemingly ignores things that directly affect that person's 'well-being' to the image of an ostrich with its head in the sand) in order to hypothesize an absolute example of 'good behavior' vs. 'bad behavior' insults my perception of reality. the writers i mentioned before do this constantly and with conviction it seems.

readers who allow these 'analogies' to dictate their perspective of reality allow for the development of 'groups of people who think in absolutes' which i think is 'bad' or 'impractical' or something.

i just read the thesis for this essay again. i will try to address that now.

i described the way that my brain responds to reading things because of what i become subconsciously preoccupied with while reading. i also addressed how some writers transform abstraction into 'memories', 'histories', and 'story-telling devices' but mostly in an indirect manner because of how emotional i felt about 'the odyssey', 'the bible', 'the lord of the rings', etc. i think that now i will attempt to address 'how i perceive these things to be used for and against "practical living"'.

this is going to seem paradoxical i think. i 'believe' that individual human beings 'should' prescribe meaning to their own abstractions to the greatest extent that 'releases the highest amount of endorphins in their brain as possible for the longest amount of time as possible' or in philosophical terms 'makes that individual "feel the happiest"'. i am aware that there are ~7billion people on the planet and that the implausibility for the majority of those people applying 'what i believe' to their lives is nearly infinite, but essays are written to convey ideas, not to impose them on people.

regarding the title, i don't feel that i properly addressed 'random absurdity's' in the way that i wanted to. i think that i was imagining 'works of nihilistic situational comedy' vs. 'dramatic works that seem "psychedelic" or "more than 50% unrealistic"' with regard to modern literature. i should have started writing about 'realistic works of fiction' and digressed into 'highly implausible works of fiction' and then did a point-by-point comparison of work on the lower end of that spectrum, but i didn't and now find myself satisfied with both this essay and this essay's title with relation to my intentions as well as the actual outcome. maybe i will write an essay about this paragraph later. i don't know. thank you for reading these things.