The Thing About Being Brad Pitt

(Even his name is in my spell check)

The thing about being Brad Pitt is that everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to know him. The moment he flashes across a television or movie screen our collective consciousness says “Hey look it is Brad Pitt!” I presume that this happens more than with any other living person (yes, even more than with Barack Obama). Brad Pitt is the person to meet. He is the one person who no matter where he goes is always greeted by a mass of anticipating and adoring hands waiting to touch his. American royalty? Maybe. The most popular guy in school? Without a doubt.

The thing about being Brad Pitt is that this must not be easy. It’s like dogs who love you because you feed them. They always want to be around you because of the possibility of food. It doesn’t matter who you truly are, how you behave, what you say or how you look. Dogs will excuse all of this because they know you got the food. For human beings Brad Pitt is the food. It has nothing to do with who he is at a deeper level. All that matters is that is Brad Pitt. Everyone wants to meet that guy they have seen in all those movies, tabloids, interviews and news clips. That guy. Not the moody guy with a stomach ache who occasionally yells at his kids and harbors a deep need to be left the hell alone.

One problem that Brad Pitt has that almost none of us ordinary folk do is that everyone wants to meet him. Everyone wants to draw him in. Everyone lights up in his presence. Everyone puts their best self forward when meeting him. Everyone is trying to manipulate him into liking them. Everyone is hoping that maybe, just maybe, Brad Pitt will become their personal friend. That he will remember them. This kind of worship must get as tiring as dealing with my dogs who are always standing at the door with a sad face on, waiting, hoping for food.

Most of us experience the opposite. The only people who pursue us with that kind of interest are creditors and enmeshed parents. When we walk down the street we are often an impediment or an object of attraction to someone who is going the other way. When we are noticed by an acquaintance or a colleague they will often stealthily cross the street to avoid crossing our path. Out there we are just another body, a person to be controlled, glanced at, judged and often avoided. Brad Pitt experiences the opposite phenomena. The moment he appears, gravitational pull takes over and bodies and minds are propelled by a force that is often out of their personal control. People come alive, for sometimes the first time in months or years when in his presence.

I’m writing about this while drinking my morning cup of coffee. I am sitting in front of the fire and my house is silent. I have a long day at work in front of me. Several people have already canceled their appointments with me (I imagine people never cancel a meeting with Brad Pitt). The reason this subject is on my mind is because last night I made the mistake of leaving the television on in the background. I heard a news story about Brad Pitt appearing at some film opening and I also heard the excitement level of all the voices on the television elevate by a hundred percent. Even the newscaster’s voice became absent of the usual drone tone. Much to my surprise I got up from what I was doing and went to see if I could get a glimpse of Brad Pitt. I wanted to see what he looked like now and also see the phenomena that occurs when he is in other people’s presence. I suppose there is a part of me that feels like I know the guy since I grew up watching him grow up. I can see the trajectory of my aging process through his films and interviews. As I watched all of the Hollywood elites smiling, standing with an erect posture (no one was slouching) and waiting to hug Brad Pitt or shake his hand- I stood at the television, just like I everyone else I imagine, for a brief moment, experiencing that one thing about being Brad Pitt.

My Failed Twitter Experiment

images I am deleting my Twitter account today. No more. The key to living a good life is knowing when enough is enough. With Twitter- I have already exceeded my enough is enough point. It is time to come down out of the trees and stop with all the tweeting.

I gave Twitter my best shot. When I started tweeting over a year ago I told myself that I would not allow Twitter to become another fixation like Facebook was. Like someone who quits drinking alcohol and takes up marijuana instead, I thought that Twitter would be a less addictive addition to my life after quitting Facebook. I was wrong. At first I only tweeted once or twice a day, but what captured the majority of my attention was that I could actually read the live time thoughts of various musicians, actors, writers, comics and artists that I admired. I would get excited every time I logged onto Twitter because in some strange way I felt like I was communicating with these minor and major celebrities whom I had always wanted to get to know. I felt like I was apart of their life in some strange way. This was my first mistake. I will come back to this later in my narrative.

From the beginning I knew that I was good at Tweeting. I felt like my tweets had substance, style, depth, originality and a brazen honesty that was like nothing else on Twitter. The name of my Twitter account was The Confessionist and in my bio I explained that I was using Twitter to engage in a radical transparency art experiment. I was not going to hold back. It was my intention to give an honest and uncensored portrayal of the various machinations that go on in my inner life. I did feel like I was over exposing myself, but this slight discomfort was a minor price to pay for my art.

After the first six months on Twitter, without any significant efforts to gain followers, I was proud and satisfied with the fact that I had achieved 98 followers. In my twenties, when I was an unpublished and unrecognized writer (which, to some degree I still am) I always used to say that if I had just one reader that would make all my efforts worth it. So I was grateful to have 98 readers. Well kind of grateful. Ok, well maybe I wanted more. A lot more. Maybe I got greedy.

I could not help but notice that some of the people who I followed had hundreds of thousands of followers. People like Marc Maron, Damien Echols, Raymond Pettibon, Yoko Ono and the lead singer from that band The Flaming Lips all had more followers than I could wrap my head around. Their tweets were no better than mine, they were less prolific tweeters than I, hardly as honest but they managed to have more followers than I have blood cells. I realize that they are all public persons, which exposes them to a wider audience and I am more of a suburban hermit- but still I began to feel like having 98 followers was hardly anything to feel good about. My accomplishment of achieving 98 followers almost felt like a failure in comparison to what these other tweeters had attained. They were like those birds in the trees who have hundreds of birds singing a long with them while I was a bird on a leafless branch with a few birdies looking at me wearily as I tweeted my tune.

The one thing that I read again and again while trying to educate myself about how to get more followers was that a tweeter needs to have patience. Successful tweeting was all about perseverance. Like a long uphill climb, you got to keep going even though you think that you can’t. So I stuck with it despite the fact that the number of my followers had started to dwindle down to 89. I tried not to take the lessening number of followers too personally and I carried on in the dark. Little did I know that a trend had begun.

I started tweeting more. Some days I was the loudest bird on the branch, generating one profound tweet after the next. I was convinced that one day my tweets would be seen for the genius that they were. They would be collected in a book and finally I would get the recognition I deserved. I accepted that for the time being I was a kind of underground, indie tweeter telling it like it was, while very few people had the intelligence or the understanding to grasp what I was saying. Such is the case with most fringe artists. I could live with this. I would tweet things like:

The only thing wrong with people’s mental health is that they do not spend enough time in nature

 

 The only problem with watering in the front yard is that I am exposed to the neighbors

 

 The thing about Twitter is no one misses you when you’re gone.

 

 

It boggles my mind that I would rather stare into an iPhone screen than look up and watch the sky.

 

 

I wonder if Thom Yorke does his own dishes?

 

 

Ok, so as I look over my tweets now I realize that maybe they were not an expression of genius. But they were good enough. Honest fragmented thoughts spelled out nicely on the digital page. I would write one tweet after the next and rather than gaining followers, I noticed the strangest thing happening. Like an airplane slowly falling out of the sky, I was losing followers. At the rate of a few a day! Before I knew it, I was down to 51 followers and I had no idea what I was doing or saying to precipitate this loss. I tried not to think about it.

 

 

I was like a man who was gradually drowning in a lake filled with Twitter. I tried desperately to grab onto whatever I could. In a tired effort to get my number of followers back up to a non-humiliating number, I started following random people whose profiles presented them as someone who might have something interesting to say. Some days I would follow hundreds of random people and then spend an hour or so the next day unfollowing them. My hope was that they would follow me and not notice that I had unfollowed them. I know, a manipulative strategy but I was desperate. Every time I looked at my dwindling number of followers I felt like I was doing something wrong. I felt like I was failing and that my failure was being publicly announced to the world on my Twitter page right beneath the word FOLLOWERS.

 

 

Then my wife informed me that the minor and major celebrities whom I followed, those lucky people who had hundreds of thousands of followers and whose tweets I enjoyed reading because they gave me a feeling of knowing them personally, were being paid per tweet. “Paid per tweet?” “Really?” I was shocked. “You mean they are not Twitter obsessed tweeters like myself but instead are tweeting so often because they are paid per tweet?” In the words of Marc Maron, “What the fuck?” Somehow this seemed unfair. It felt like I had been the unknowing victim of a manipulative magic trick.

 

 

Twitter pays these people per tweet so that all the rest of us unpaid tweeters feel like we are on the same level as the celebrities we admire. Or even worse it keeps us tweeting because we want to be more like them! Twitter presents all of its fellow tweeters as equals in the Twitter universe. But its bullshit! Tweeters are not created equally and those whose celebrity status affords them the ability to have more followers than the average person are getting paid to create the impression that they are just like all the rest of us. Like a bird on a branch whose tweeting gets all the other birdies to tweet along! No thanks.

 

 

I had no choice but to unfollow all of the minor and major celebrities that I was following, which left me feeling all alone in the Twitterverse.

 

 

Gradually the amount of followers that I had dwindled down to 32. 32! For some reason this number seemed to stabilize at 32. I stayed at 32 for months. I have a feeling that these 32 followers are people who have deserted their Twitter accounts. They left their Twitter accounts active but no longer come around anymore. So I have become a lone bird who is tweeting in a tree to the skeletons of birds that once were. Great.

 

 

My time on Twitter has awoken me to the harsh realization of my non-celebrity status. I suppose that before Twitter I thought that I had the potential for fame in me and it was only a matter of time before others picked up on this. But now I see that not only am I a non-celebrity but actually I am a non-non-non-celebrity since I lost the majority of my very few followers on Twitter. To think that back in the day when I had 98 followers was the height of my fame, is a rather sobering thought with regards to my artistic and literary accomplishments in this world. Maybe I am not meant to be one of those people who have thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. As hard as I have tried, it seems to just not be my fate in this life. Now I need to come down out of the branches, stop tweeting out loud into a larger world that does not want to hear my song and realize that at the age of 42 my fame extends not much further beyond my wife, my dogs and those darn mosquito’s who seem to be addicted to taking a bite out of me every night when I am asleep. Goodbye Twitter.

Will Write For Food (Organic) Or Money.

What little money I once had seems to have dissolved with a speed that not even entropy could compete with. Now you may all be thinking that entropy is a slow and gradual process, but I would argue that this is true until you have reached the end. Then entropy feels is if it had taken no time at all to move towards an end (it is like how older people say “my life has passed so quick!”). I once had money, plenty of money- but now my bank account is a few dollars away from a negative balance and there is little relief in site. It all happened so quick.

I have never been a terribly ambitious man. I have lived my life with a certain contentment that has always worried my father and made me into a man with little accomplishments- if any. I have taken each day as a thing unto or into itself and worried little for another day which everyone has always told me will follow. I have kept to myself and cultivated my own rose garden but now in my 36th year of life it seems as if this rose garden is in jeopardy of complete destruction. I have not the money to afford the soil that I need to harvest my beautiful roses. Instead I have been using compost- and it is no longer seeming to do the trick.

Money has always been an issue in my life. My parents have always had lots of it and I have seemed to struggle with cents in comparison. I have been waiting for fame to strike like a desperate man who is watching a clock move at a speed, which seems to suggest that the clocks batteries are about to die. My financial woes have been comforted by a perpetual thought of impending fame, which so far has only been a gross delusion of my misguided mind. “Tomorrow,” my mind says- “you will write a novel or be discovered to play a role in a film that will abolish all of your financial burdens, so don’t worry about today- just drink a beer and relax.” It is as if my mind has made me believe that one morning I will wake up and wealth will be waiting for me upon my door step. All I have to do is sit back, relax and wait for it to appear.

Meanwhile my wife is in a state of perpetual frustration with me, my car is not working because of $1,500 dollars worth of work that needs to be done, the price of gas has gone up to $4.00 a gallon, the utilities bill is collecting spiderwebs, my rent check bounced, the minimum balance due on my credit card is $517.00 because of 17 late fees, the price of food is causing me to have to eat cheap processed food which is in turn affecting my health, my cat is eating a cheaper form of cat food which gives him bladder infections, I am depressed and underpaid at a job which I will not be able to keep because it is taking up to much of the time I need to be working at another job making a better income. I am finding it difficult to ask others for help (although I am going to write a letter to the President asking him if he can give me a job writing something for him) and I try to not think about my ailments by spending my time staring at a wall, drinking beer, watching pornography and reading books half way through and then putting them back upon the shelf.

I will write for food (preferably organic) or money. There is nothing that I will not write about nor do I care if my name is used. I will write and then you can use your name and I will not say a word to anyone about it. I have been practicing the craft of writing for years always knowing in the back of my mind that it is a trade that I could use if everything in my life went bad. Of course, at the time I thought that this would never happen because I was young, idealistic, stoned and certain of my greatness. Now I am older, pessimistic and swimming through my own personal recession, which seems to be slowly breaking down the structure of my life. These are desperate times, especially for a man such as myself who has little ambition to do anything and only wants to be able to say at the end of the day (with a copy of Mark Twain or Thoreau’s Walden in my hand) that I did the best I can to live my life as a free man. I am living in America in a time where truth seems to have been turned on its head and all citizens of this country are living inside an irony so great that it is swallowing everyone alive. So please remember- I will write for food or money. I can not spell very well but my hope is that you have enough money to not only afford me but also an editor.