“I Literally Cannot Make Comments on Public Facebook Posts”

Ah, where to start… let’s see I’m pretty poor… the weather’s pretty nice out this year… I usually get in the mood for Jimmy Eat World – Bleed American around this time of year… I’ve been amazingly getting to sleep on a little snack and three Milwaukee’s Best Lights lately… life could be worse but I LITERALLY CANNOT MAKE COMMENTS ON PUBLIC FACEBOOK POSTS because if I do the general populace will fly into a volcanic fit of rage hitherto unbeknownst to all the hinterlands, or something.

Take this Rolling Stone feed I saw pertly rearing its head close to a week ago: “25 years ago we talked with Kurt Cobain” and the point of the article being how happy Kurt Cobain was and how apparently “Success doesn’t suck.” Well, seeing as this would have been the winter before the April in which he killed himself, I thought I’d go out on a limb and make the bold observation of these two events’ proximity to each other, thinking that him having killed himself, or at least being DEAD, were a pretty insuperable, objective fact, and which would serve in part to negate the assertion that “Success doesn’t suck.” Ok, here’s the response I got to it. One dude just goes “really?” Another dude, after I’d said that he killed himself a week later (they’d said it was “25 years ago” so I assumed they meant to the date), goes, ” like a big sarcastic Tutankhamen, “Hmmm… Jan 27 to April 5th is one week? Yeah. Stick to your crayons.” So just like that we have two conclusions: one that these people magically brought Kurt Cobain back from the dead with their righteous Facebook civility, and two, once a toddler gains the ability to gauge temporal intervals in terms of weeks and months, he no longer has a taste for playing with crayons. Of course, my personal favorite was “Michael Beal choke on a dick.” That was like the icing on the cake, if you will. At least he had the courtesy to tag me, I guess.

Ok. Here’s the first thing you have to understand. Rolling Stone was not Kurt Cobain’s friend, nor are they anybody’s friend. I follow them on Facebook because they’re informative and generally come in pretty handy for a blogger but this is the publication that said Colin Meloy looked like a “freak,” that championed Janelle Monae and put Lenny Kravitz daughter naked on the cover for no reason other than… it was Lenny Kravitz’ daughter naked. We’re not talking about a set of voices of acute artistic sensitivity here. They want Kurt Cobain in the “success” pool because that makes them look good — if people flock to indie bands, the way they did in ’05, then the ability of a corporate magazine like Rolling Stone to embody the voice of the public is rendered severely wan — people are much more likely to read a scrappy rag like Pitchfork (hey in ’05 it actually was scrappy), Coke Machine Glow (R.I.P. 2015) or The (excellent) LA Record. Actually, for the band’s first Rolling Stone photo shoot, Kurt Cobain even wore a shirt on which he wrote “Corporate magazines still suck.” [1] But don’t tell that to these Facebook cops.

So, by the basic phsycological law of positive punishment (the instatement of a social force designed to discourage past behavior), a form of classical conditioning, I no longer make comments…. when somebody says that Cobain’s death was April 7, not April 5 as I heard reported by like eight different heartwarming sources yesterday (all this uplifting fanfare has prompted me to share Primus’ “Bob” onto my Facebook timeline), I don’t chime in and say, “I think the carbon date was April 5,” despite the fact that such a statement would be RIGHT and it would also teach people a new term, “carbon date,” which means date of death. Nobody wants to hear that sh**. People hate it when you tell them sh**. People hate it when you’re smarter than them. And it’s people who started the Punic Wars, so lately I’ve been listening to ’em, for better or worse.

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[1] Thank you Everett True’s Nirvana: the Biography… Danny who?

 

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