Robert Manners

Where's the Cutting Edge?

Everybody has a blog. Even Wil Wheaton. Remember him? I do. Fondly.



I think those were the shortest sentences I've written all at once in a very long time. I don't care very much for short sentences, I think they are the evil legacy of Steinbeck and Hemingway, those testosterone-spouting he-male hacks. Give me an Oscar Wilde 152-word sentence any day, a Jane Austen clause of dizzying complexity, a Marcel Proust chapter guaranteed to send its reader into a deep and dreamless slumber. Go ahead and use those big words every time you learn one (for today: Formication, the sensation of imaginary ants crawling on one's skin...not to be confused with forNication, which is loads more fun or so I'm told). See how many words and clauses you can link together and still be grammatically correct.



Returning ever so briefly to Wil Wheaton, I went over and read his website today on the recommendation of one of the members of my Gay Chatterboxes email group. It's interesting, since I only know him from his work and never heard or read an interview and had no idea what sort of person he is off-screen. How shocked I am that he is married and has children...or at least I think he's married. He talks about living with someone named Anne, and an apparent son named Nolan who seems to be 10 and plays soccer, and another person named Ryan is involved somewhere, and there's a dog named Ferris. But I'm more surprised to learn that he's not very interested in film anymore and is instead developing new avenues in Improvisational Comedy. And that he's fond of Sarcasm as a form of humor...which pretty much lost me.



I don't care much for sarcasm. It's one of the cheapest forms of wit, and the worst form of humor (no, I take that back, farting is the worst, sarcasm is the second-worst). It can be wildly entertaining in the hands of a master (Paul Lynde comes immediately to mind), but is irritating in the extreme when mangled by an amateur. And most people who enjoy sarcasm are incapable of weilding it.



But Wil seems to do a tolerable job. And he's certainly not afraid of using lots and lots of words. I like that in a man.



So I find myself in a quandary: should I feel good that I, as a blogger, am in such good company? Or should I worry that I jumped in on this trend after it had been corrupted by the masses? Whenever I hear someone ask "what's a blog?" I breathe a sigh of relief. When you can get a laugh by mentioning "blog" on a sitcom, it may be time for Little Miss Me to retire from the field. I don't like to be trendy, and I absolutely loathe being common.