a poorly developed argument about why I don't care about you

I have this troublesome steaming pile of energy inside me that is just not being useful. I can't reign it in to get anything done. I can focus it enough to make it productive. I'm just waiting to explode. Even my creative outlets are failing me. Troublesome, indeed.

The other day I was hanging First Friday fliers around SVSU and ended up visiting an old prof's creative writing class. They were discussing what legitimate literature (art) is and how to determine what is and isn't and whatnot, and the talk turned to folks who write super personal pieces, what to do with that? Not that all art isn't personal in a sense, but some certainly verges on Dear Diary territory, stuff about break-ups and feeling oh so alone. The prof asked me, "You write professional pieces, but you also write personal ones, like the White's Bar poem [referring to a poem I wrote in class called "I Fucking Hate White's Bar" which I won't share, because it's not that good, but was basically about hating that place because it reminded me of too many horrible love/hate relationships. It almost got me laughed out of the room, and a classmate compared it to a Bob Seger song.] Can you do that?" My response, barely missing a beat, was, "You can do it, but no one has to care."

And why SHOULD anyone care? I have a hard time backing memoirs and even a lot of creative non-fiction because I feel like I'm overwhelmed with life stories every day via social networking, reality television, cell phones, etc. I can follow the careers, relationships, and everyday details of my friends, famous people, fictional characters, and total strangers via blog, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Livejournal, and on and on. It's beyond a crave for attention, it's not enough for people to notice, people need to be interested. Self-involvement and self-reflection and self-absorbtion has so permeated every aspect of culture, that I just don't think it's interesting.

That's not to say I'm not 100% guilty of everything I've just ranted against. I have profiles on Myspace and Facebook with way more "friends" than I would ever go out of my way to talk to in real life. I text people for reason other than my own boredom, despite whatever may be going on in their own lives. I have a blog (obviously) which is the highest form of imposing your self-involvement onto other people. I mean, it's essentially your brain and your day for everyone to see. It's like tacking your journal pages onto street lamp posts (to varying degrees, of course. The degrees of which people share themselves online is a whole other rant). But if I take it back to the literature argument, I think it gives me an even stronger case against people who write poems and stories about shit in their lives and expect it to be received as art.