Striking Back for America

Being the transparent persona non grata in many circles that I am, people often feel that I am being something less than transparent. In fact, many of those same people are downright nasty and probably yell at their mother's on the telephone about how they didn't have time for them when they were 8 years old, scaring their roomates half to death and forcing them to remain secluded in their room.

So needless to say I get a lot of gripes. I usually cope with these mindless tantrums and complaints the way the President does - by completely ignoring them, and forging ahead to a shiny destination in the future met by a thousand points of light. However, a recent anonymous commenter made a comment that I so completely disagreed with that I decided to forego my normal response to said cowardly anonymous commenter and point out kindly in the comments section how ridiculous and unthought out their commentary was and how they should take their dissenting opinion to a place where it will be met with much less virulent dissent and open honest and frank discussion - you know, someplace like Palestine.

So for the benefit of those readers who can't trouble themselves to go back one column and peruse leisurely the remarks that I refer to, I will quote the offending comment in its entirety.

"Dude what is the purpose of this blog? To be funny? To give us real insight into your daily life? Your recent entry does neither." by the reader who has named himself "Hey" posted at 3:07 pm

Since this comment refers specifically to my recent blog (the one right before this one) I will quote liberally from it to defend myself from these unwarranted attacks.

Hey begins with a legitimate question, and one that I find myself asking more and more these days, just what is the purpose of this blog? Well, I think the fact that I have called it "Diary of a Future Superstar" should give you a pretty good idea. It's a diary, so I'm free to write about pretty much whatever I want within legal, ethical, and personal moral standards. I enjoy movies and pop culture, so references to those often find themselves nestled within my fascinating words of wisdom to which I and others should aspire to.

I also happen to be very funny. This is backed up by literally hundreds of quotes from friends and associates who will attest to this great maxim that indeed "Josh is a funny dude." In fact, I have a new friend Long-Haired Tourist Guide who introduces me to all of his friends like this, "Josh is the worst comedian I've ever met, but he has the best timing, and timing is everything." So, since I am funny, a lot of my frank writing, which is basically all of my material, will often contain large chunks of humor which may be unnoticible to the common sense of humor, much like how only bats can hear certain high pitched noises.

To prove it, I will insert quote #1 from previous column, "So what does the future hold for future superstar, Mr. Joshua Dudley? Well, after this column is over I'm going to get up off of this futon and eat some cereal."

I would like to point out that this quote is from the beginning of the last column and that it sets the tone for the piece as a whole and is actually funny. I'll explain why. The question of what does the future hold is generally perceived to be referring to a time in the near future defined in generally mushy terms as being weeks, months or years away. Comedy is in a sense about re-direction, you get the audience thinking that you're taking them one way and boom you hit them up side of the head with your sense of how things are really going from a totally different direction than the the one that they were expecting. Instead of talking in vague terms about what I was going to be doing weeks or months from now I stated what I was going to be doing in the next few minutes. On what I think is a funny side note, after the column was finished I couldn't decide if I was still hungry or not, until upon re-reading my newly finished column I discovered that I needed to eat cereal, which I had clearly forgotten about, so the whole joke became a big "note to self."


The second big attack by Mr. Hey is his question about how this blog should provide insight into my daily life but it does not. Well Mr. Hey I think I have effectively slaughtered 2 birds with one stone with that last piece, since if you will note that it points out that I like to eat cereal.

Later on, I provide intelligent commentary into the whole Dave Chappelle morass which was recently broadcast on the Oprah Winfrey Show to a national television audience of several million. This indicates that I am either concerned about Dave Chappelle as a person, that for my own personal gain I want to see his show continue, or that I am hip to what America is talking about and just want to share in the conversation. Whichever way you slice it, it is obviously an insight into my daily life, part of which consists of thinking about funny Dave Chappelle moments. Like right now, I am thinking about Dave Chappelle dressed as Rick James being kicked up into the air by Charlie Murphy, playing himself and hitting in slow motion a dresser drawer and breaking a mirror.

Later still in the post I talk about the purpose of the blog and explain that I just "have to be me" of which the entire previous post is representative of and if Mr. Hey cannot see that then it is really too bad for him and there is nothing that I can do to help except reccommend some expensive counseling sessions with Dr. Melfy

However, none of this making sense to Mr. Hey right now, who probably thinks that I am completely stonewalling the issue when he cannot see the plain truth right in front of his nose. This is who I am. This is what I write about. How much do you think a person can write without revealing something deeper about themselves? I would have to be a fantastic storyteller or an incredible narcissist to write all these columns since July without revealing in fact a great deal about who I am. The truth should be obvious, but some people have a lot of 'splainin to do.

Now I'm not gonna lie to you, I try to make this thing interesting and you sure can't please everybody, although to people like Mr. Hey it would seem like maybe I should.

In conclusion Mr. Hey, my recent post in fact does both show who I am while being funny at the same time. It also allows for some incredibly awkward endings.