Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Response to The Intro/Chapter 1

So I suppose I could belittle the last book we had to read for class, and mention how glad I am to be done with that book and its associated crappiness. I could make borderline slanderous (or libel, as it's the printed word) comments about how much that book sucks and how this new book glows in comparison. But Rob Davis is above that.

Some thought-provoking ideas in this new book. I found the concept of whether the meaning in a message is created by the author or reader (or speaker or listener) interesting. I guess it's easy to assume that the meaning is created by the person delivering it. Still, if the audience doesn't understand that meaning, does the message have a meaning at all, or does it just have another meaning that the audience created for itself? Can different people take away different meanings, or is there one big Meaning?

I relate that to something like songwriting, where certain writers are vague and broad enough in their lyrics so that everyone relates on some level. They write songs about their own lives, and yet they leave the door open so that the fifteen-year-old who steals the music off the internet can apply it to his life. I guess the answer to this whole (poorly written) rambling nonsense is that the author has his idea of meaning, and the reader has his own thoughts on that matter, and the truth is somewhere in between. Or maybe everyone creates their own meaning for everything in their life. Or maybe everything is just meaningless and I should dye my hair black and wear eyeliner and write bad poetry and listen to emo (ah, that takes me back to sophomore year...).

I've always been a big fan of phony apologies. In fact, I've probably only apologized for real about five times in my life, and those were for instances such as the time I called my mom a "bitch" (in fairness to me, though, my mom was a bitch when I was 15, so even that probably wasn't that real of an apology). I would wager that the majority of apologies are fake: carefully worded to express the expected message of some sort of regret, yes, but devoid of any real substance and genuine meaning. How "sorry" are you really when you say you're sorry? You're sorry you woke up your roommate? Sure you are.... You're sorry you cut someone off in traffic? Yeah, right.

Apologies are strange animals: you expect them, if you don't get them it pisses you off, and yet they really don't have much actual value other than as a social mechanism. If somebody hits your car in the parking lot, you expect a sorry but it doesn't keep you from being pissed off. No one I know says, "Oh, since you're sorry just don't worry about the $2500 of body damage." But if you don't get that sorry, you'll be bitching the next day, "And the jackass didn't even say he was sorry...."

Likewise, Bill Clinton wasn't the least bit sorry about lying about the whole Lewinsky thing. Oh, he had to come out and act humbled and regretful about it, but to quote my grandmother "he was only sorry he got caught in the lie." How sorry do you think Clinton would've been had no one found out about the whole sordid affair? I doubt he would've have been kept awake at night by guilt and regret.

In closing, I'm sorry I didn't go to class last Thursday. I'm also sorry I downloaded all those Weezer albums illegally, and I'm sorry that I use the f-word far, far too often (I wrote a screenplay and put the dreaded f-word in it over 300 times), and I'm sorry that the only coherent thoughts I can muster about the Olympics relate to how hot all the female athletes are. Finally, I'm sorry that I wrote this much, and I'm sorry that you read it.