Holiday In Suburbia by Randal Graves (ghostwritten by Dave Wink)
When I wrote this blog, or rather the bulk of it, I lived alone, in the suburbs, miles from New York City, in a tent in the woods of a New Jersey park, and earned my living by the labor of being the sole clerk at RST Video. A clerk is rich in proportion to the number of things he can leave alone, and I choose the fucking customers. Whenever I closed the store at noon to play hockey, I radiated good cheer, and peace flowed to me accordingly. I should not talk so much about myself if I did not find it best to stay out of other people’s affairs. My friend Dante at the nearby Quick Stop convenience store was willing to take the world upon his shoulders – you do not want to hear the compensation he received for it. Monkeys could do his job. It matters little whether you are committed to commerce or jizz-mopping at the nudie booth. The worker is best who works not at all. By this standard, the last many years have been a great time for America. I have traveled a great deal in New Jersey; everywhere are scenes of men doing penance in a cubicle. Not one in ten has had a positive venture capital experience. I cultivated a few cubic feet of video store, and badly, I might add. You work at your jobs, badly as well. Instead of a hundred customers a day, if it be a necessity, serve three. If we did not care so much about our jobs, why would we need to escape into videos? Hardly a clerk wakes a half hour’s nap after just having opened their store, but when he wakes he holds up his iPod and asks, “What is your status update?” Well, if we’re so fucking advanced, why are we working?
Meta-Commentary
In order to fully appreciate the above commentary, you probably have to have seen the film Clerks. The piece has been credited as being ghostwritten by myself in the name of Clerks character Randal Graves. Where the lines of the piece stray from the words of Henry David Thoreau, they are making allusions to things said and experienced by Randal's character. An exception is the mention of Randal living in the woods; I added this piece of information to further link the fictional Graves to the autobiographer Thoreau. I am presupposing that most modern readers would catch these allusions.
Some, hopefully, humorous anachronisms arise from having paired the stuffy 18th century style of Thoreau's monologue with the 20th century tone of Randal's dialogue. In the second chapter of Thoreau's Walden, he says "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford left alone." In the movie Clerks, Randal says that he could do without the customers in the video store; when asked by his friend Dante which ones, he replies, "All of them." Randal also states "this job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers." These opposing tones were combined into the sentence, "A clerk is rich in proportion to the number of things he can leave alone, and I choose the fucking customers."
It has been noted of Thoreau “many readers mistake Henry's tone in Walden and other works, thinking he was a cranky hermit. That was far from the case…he found greater joy in his daily life than most people ever would” (Woodlief). This irony seems to fit both Randal and Thoreau. Randal may characterize people as “fucking customers,” but that is only because work is a complication that is supposed to, but does not, prevent him from shutting down the store to do such things as play hockey. Thoreau, both in this satire and in Walden, characterized working as “doing penance.” Neither men are inclined to debase themselves by working out of some sense of obligation, but that does not imply that they do not lead joyful lives.
Professor Donna Campbell’s page on Transcendentalism quotes Orestes Brownson as having said, “Are all things in the universe to be held subordinate to the individual soul?” Never in the parody do I reference the spiritual beliefs that are at the heart of Transcendentalism and Thoreau, yet much like Brownson's words, at the heart of the parody is an implied mockery at the selfishness of these people. Thoreau had said in Walden “instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one.” His philosophy was built around not working, yes, but not working as an act of self-deprivation. One did not really need the wages of full time work. I have Randal making the much more selfish assertion “instead of a hundred customers a day, if it be a necessity, serve three,” but Randal intends on pocketing the whole day’s wage. It may be unfair to imply that Thoreau would do the same, but as Brownson would have it, Thoreau may have been imperiling a universe of immortal souls, and which is really worse: offense to video store customers or offense to God?
Dickinson In Twelve Tweets
#FirstJob Success is counted sweetest
#BieberRapsBetterThan By those who ne'er succeed.
#SundayRoutine To comprehend a nectar
#LadiesWeWantAnswers Requires sorest need.
#SuperBowlHalfTimeShouldBe Not one of all the purple host
#FiveWordsToMyEx Who took the flag to-day
#LiesThatAlwaysWorked Can tell the definition,
#EnougIsEnough So clear, of victory!
#IKnewItWasOverWhen As he, defeated, dying,
#TweetThePress On whose forbidden ear
#WrongSongsToPlayInPrison The distant strains of triumph
#CNNDebate Burst agonized and clear!
Meta-Commentary
The above parody is a modern embellishment on an Emily Dickinson poem. Rightly, it should not be viewed as a twelve-line poem. Rather, the inclusion of Twitter hashtags has turned it into a series of twelve individual tweets. Each of the hashtags are actual Twitter tags that have trended within the last year; that is, many site users made a game of completing the phrase. If the lines are read sequentially, the alliteration of the original poem is maintained, if a bit obscured by the beginnings, as is the rhyme scheme, for the ending sounds have not changed. Unfortunately, the meter, or rhythm, of the original poem is entirely gone.
It is hard to say to what degree writing poetry was ever the “in” thing to do, but it seems likely that poetry is less-popular now than it was during Dickinson’s time, yet thousands of people seek some measure of fame and popularity by crafting clever ‘tweets’ that fall within the 140 character limit of the Twitter website. Professor Ann Woodlief’s biography page on Dickinson has said that she seemed “to leave out so much with her elliptical style” but the “gaps are filled with meaning.” This compressed style of writing would have been well suited to the Twitter format. A tweet such as the line “#CNNDebate Burst agonized and clear!” can imply any number of things, depending upon the listener.
Professor Lilia Melani’s page on Dickinson quotes Northrup Frye, saying “it would be hard to name another poet in the history of the English language with so little interest in social or political events." That certainly counts as a strike against Dickinson using the Twitter platform. #BieberRapsBetterThan, #SuperBowlHalfTimeShouldBe and #CNNDebate are overtly hashtags of that sort, and the remainder are trite sayings that a serious poet may be best served by staying away from.
Most delightful to me is the change in meaning done to the line “#SuperBowlHalfTimeShouldBe Not one of all the purple host.” Originally, this would have been a reference to a member of a royal army. The implication after the inclusion of the hashtag is that the Vikings football team has no place in a halftime Super Bowl show.
In some cases, the tags have managed to preserve much of the intent of the original line. “#FirstJob Success is counted sweetest” means much the same as it did before. Getting your first job is more exciting than those that follow because it is something you have not had the chance to experience. In fact, it even trumps Dickinson on brevity, as the hashtag is short, and it does not require the following line, “By those who ne'er succeed,” in order to be understood. Of course, Dickinson holds that your opinion of having a job would be even higher if you never succeeded in getting one.
* In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that the term 'positive venture capital experience' was lifted from the Twitter account of comedian Todd Barry. On November 11th of 2010, he tweeted, "Oh no! Guy sitting near me at coffee shop "hasn't had a single positive venture capital experience."" While Barry did not create any of the hashtags used in the Dickinson piece, all of the hashtags used were trending topics that he had participated in, and his account is where I went to generate a list of hashtags for use in my parody.
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