The pursuit of perfection—and especially the pursuit of ensuring my creative output says exactly what I want it to say—means that I might not offer up everything I create to the public. Exempli gratia: I just finished reviewing a recently recorded video, and realized I inadvertently left the impression that certain people who proport to be my fan are not worthy of me seeing them as such. The comment was spoken in such a way that most people might not even pick up on the potentially ill-willed and very much unintended sentiment. But I did pick it up. And it was not the message I wanted to convey. Ergo, I’m going to reshoot the video in its entirety. I want there to be no misinterpretation about what I said / meant / intended.
But how bulletproof can any of us make our content or our words? We all know how our society works, where unhappiness and adversarialism is more entertaining than truth and peacefulness. Because of that, there are those whose sole purpose—and, apparently, whose sole talent—is to stoke controversy whether it exists or not. In other words, they enjoy stirring up a pot that didn’t need attention, then sit back and enjoy watching people freak out over the mental odor. It has been my observation that the vast majority of these acts are performed by those who don’t actually create anything of worth. The advent of social media has magnified the ability to perpetrate this sort of nonsense, but trust me when I say this penchant for causing unnecessary discordance has been going on well before Internet access showed up on the timeline.
There was a point where I was meticulous—paranoid!—about what I wrote and what I said. I wanted my point and my meaning to be so clear that only someone who has been clinically braindead for a few hundred years would miss it. Unfortunately, I found out there are those out there who will interpret my words in any way that will guarantee their purpose of creating a trigger point. I’m at the stage now where I refuse to give in to my former bouts of paranoia. Conflict mongers are going to be conflict mongers, no matter what. I insist on being an artist, a creator, and entertainer, a purveyor of thoughts and ideas and points of view that might spark others to do the same. But I am still dead set on one insistency: if—when—I’m going to be called out for anything I release to the public, I want it to at least be based on something I actually meant to say.
But I doubt my negative-dwelling counterparts will expend enough brain wattage to care about that, either.
Bloggathah 