My greatest challenge: Battling the mediocrity monster

Bill Murray and Chevy Chase in Caddyshack

One of the most infamous anecdotes in Saturday Night Live's turbulent history occurred during the 1977-1978 season when the notoriously-contentious Chevy Chase returned to host the program after bailing on the series early in its run to pursue a movie career. Bill Murray had replaced Chevy in the cast by that point, and the two comedians did not get along well during a stormy week of rehearsal. In fact, they came to blows backstage. During that altercation, Murray made one of show business' all-time great retorts to his cleft-chinned rival: "Medium talent!"

Ouch, Bill. That stings.

Gossamer a.k.a. Mediocrity

Mediocrity is the fate which ultimately frightens me the most. I realize that only a tiny fraction of the world can truly be "great" and that there are only so many "geniuses" out there, but I don't know how the rest of the population deals with that fact. It scares the hell out of me. In fact, I think of Mediocrity as being a big, hairy monster following me around. If you want to picture him (yes, Mediocrity is male), imagine the character of Gossamer from the old Looney Tunes. That's the creature hovering over me every time I try to create something or accomplish something of significance, constantly reminding me that I simply do not have the talent, the drive, or the ambition to be included among the greats. 

It's a fear which I have already discussed indirectly on this blog, incidentally in a way which also referenced SNL. Check out this November 2011 post in which I discuss the relationship between Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo and compare it to that of Mozart and Salieri in Amadeus. What I didn't say at the time was that those stories resonated with me because I'm secretly worried I'm the Salieri/Piscopo to someone else's Mozart/Murphy. Even my spellchecker agrees here, because it recognizes the words "Amadeus," "Mozart," and "Murphy" but not "Salieri" or "Piscopo." Sorry, Salieri and Piscopo, you lose.

My one anthology appearance.

I have been a musician (my instrument, the euphonium, was chosen for me in elementary school) for two-thirds of my life, and yet I don't have to look beyond my own section of the community band to find people younger than I am who play better than I do or ever will. I've done sketches and cartoons since childhood, and I have a big portfolio of work in a drawer of my bureau, but there are literally small children who can out-draw me. 

As a blogger, I have amassed over 800,000 page views, but most of that is random Google traffic rather than people specifically visiting this blog for me and my work. 

As a writer, I have produced reviews, scripts, plays, essays, and stories for the Internet since the mid-1990s. I even have one terrible, unreadable novel to my credit. (And when I say it is "unreadable," I mean that I myself cannot make it past the first chapter.) I felt for a while that my niche might be in creating short stories. To date, I have exactly one such story in a published anthology, the rather obscure and disreputable collection entitled First Time Dead 2. I contributed a few short stories to the now-dormant Unloosen website a few years ago and generated a smattering of interest there, but when I re-edited and repurposed those stories as entries on this blog, the silence with which they were greeted was deafening. To date, they're among the least-viewed articles in this blog's history. If you'd like to read them, I will add a "short stories" tag to the bottom of this article. Just click on it, and you'll find them all.

Thirsty Lad

Incidentally, I made my own crude stab at doing a wholly-original comic strip a few years ago, just ball point pen on notebook paper and strictly for the amusement of my coworkers. It was called Trolleytown Frolics, and the original main characters were two talking animals: the hard-partying, often-crude Rabbit Sam and the eerily calm and evil Uncle Penguin. 

The basic idea was that Rabbit Sam would come to Uncle Penguin for advice, and the nefarious penguin would intentionally steer the rabbit's life in the wrong direction. My initial concept was to draw it once and then just change the dialogue each time, but I wound up abandoning that plan very quickly. The cast soon grew to include a number of human characters, largely based on my own coworkers at the time. There was Rabbit Sam's impatient girlfriend, Maxine, and her best friend, Sadie Nightingale (who moonlighted as a super-heroine called The Sylph), officious wunderkind Skippy, and Thirsty Lad, a hapless mascot for a line of off-brand paper towels. Thirsty was my surrogate in the strip. 

Ultimately, Skippy and Thirsty took over Trolleytown Frolics, forming a kind of Bert & Ernie comedy team. By then, though, most of the people on whom the strip was based had either transferred to other departments or left the company entirely, so the strip came to an end. Like everything else I've done, it fell well short of greatness. I still have a big folder of loose notebook pages with old strips on them, and it dwells in the same bureau as my portfolio of sketches. The one lasting legacy of the strip is that I've used "Rabbit Sam" and "Thirsty Lad" as aliases at a few online forums.

Maybe I have not found my calling yet. Maybe I never will. The work should be and often has been its own reward, but I cannot help but want to make some kind of permanent mark on this world I inhabit. I want something which will say, "JOE WAS HERE!" Who knows when I'll find it?

P.S. - I was supposed to "get out there" and experience some of that famous "fresh air" and "exercise" today, but instead I spent nearly the entire day in bed. Whoops!

Here's my NaNoWriMo novel: PERFORATED by Joe Blevins

Ready to read my unreadable novel?

Hey, kids!

Remember way back in November when I spent the entire month working on my NaNoWriMo book? In case you don't remember, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. The basic idea is to write an entire 50,000-word novel in 30 days, starting November 1. This was my first year attempting NaNo, and I'm proud to say I made it across the finish line.

Well, anyway, if you were curious how my book turned out, you can read the finished novel, Perforated, right here in this very blog.

ADVANCE WARNING: This novel is in no way "good" or "readable." NaNoWriMo is much more about typing than real writing. You should know in advance that the narrator is a very nasty fellow indeed, so the book contains a fair share of politically incorrect language and profanity as well. Also, absolutely no editing has been done to the text. Enjoy!

The entire text of the novel is included below. Just remember, I warned you.

I got dem ol' post-NaNoWriMo blues again, mama!

My fellow citizens of the world,

So here we are, five days into the month of December. The glory that was National Novel Writing Month is now but a flickering ember. (You see? That's just the kind of hackneyed metaphor you can expect from us amateur writer types.) In case you were wondering: yes, I finished my novel, meaning that I limped across the 50,000-word finish line before November 30 and dropped to the ground, exhausted. Here, incidentally, is the cover I designed for my book:



The cover design was inspired by one of Andy Warhol's silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe:



As you can see, the novel I spent a month writing is called Perforated, and it is about the paper towel industry. Specifically, it is a "memoir" written by an advertising mascot named Thirsty Lad. (That's him on the cover.) Essentially, this book takes place in a universe in which advertising characters like Tony the Tiger or the Jolly Green Giant are real and live among humans, somewhat like the 'toons in Roger Rabbit. The book is really meant to be a parody of those quickie cash-in books written by B-list celebrities. I pass by a bookstore on my way to work, and I see these silly, disposable pseudo-books prominently displayed in the window each morning. I guess something snapped in my brain, and I felt the need to parody them as savagely as possible. But I didn't know if I could get 50,000 words out of that premise, so I made it the story-within-a-story. The wraparound story is about how the whole book is actually being written by an insane dentist whose crimes against society are so ghastly, so utterly horrific that they cannot be described. I don't know where the "killer dentist" plot came in, except that I'm afraid of dentists and I'd recently screened both versions of Little Shop of Horrors for an article I'd written on another site.

Anyway, I'm glad to have "won" NaNoWriMo this year, but I mostly learned what not to do if I ever try this again. For one thing, I'm not going to wait until the morning of November 1 to decide on the the subject of the book, and I'm not going to try to improvise an entire novel from scratch with no outline or even a basic game plan. Perforated is an awful mess, probably unreadable, but it does exist. Anyone who is interested in reading it is certainly welcome to do so. Is there some easy, convenient way to post an entire novel on the internet (preferably with formatting)? If anyone has a suggestion, let me know.

Thanks.