Hearing The Three Degrees sing "Everybody's Going To The Moon" in The French Connection hasn't actually been the worst experience of my life. It wasn't actually even the worst experience I've had in the past week. The one comment I've gotten so far, about the post where I said that, was actually almost as traumatic for me as those several minutes of movie soundtrack. I suspect that the person who wrote that comment may not have read the entire post before commenting on it. I actually end up saying some nice things about The Three Degrees, and speculating that maybe the scene in the movie where they sing comes off so badly for me because of the way it was recorded, which may have been completely out of their control. Be that as it may, of course, everyone has the right to think whatever they want of anything I write, just as I have every right to dislike some recordings by The Three Degrees, such as that one, and to like some of their other recordings, such as "When Will I See You Again," the favorite soul song of the 70's of Bill from Kill Bill.
The point I'm rambling toward here is that I write some things on this blog which I don't mean for people to take anywhere near literally. The title of my previous post is one example. Other examples are when I refer to agnostics as the worst people in the history of the Earth, or imply that all Buddhists annoy me, or put a tagline under the blog's title which reads Ce n'est pas le faux singe, or for that matter, the blog's current tagline: as far as I know I don't actually have any mortal enemies and no scheming supervillain named Cliche Man exists. Or for that matter, my identity as The Wrong Monkey. I'm not a monkey, and I'm not always wrong, and we all know that, and that is supposed to set the tone for the blog: you can't always be sure whether I'm being entirely serious. Every now and then I'm asking my readers to take a moment and think about what I'm doing. Sometimes, there's no getting around it, I'm just messing with you.
I'm not blaming that commenter for being angry, not at all. On the contrary, I feel bad for upsetting him or her. I really do. It's perfectly understandable that someone might visit this blog for the first time and completely misunderstand what's going on. That's one of the unfortunate things which often happen with writers like me who are often sarcastic. Jonathon Swift, I'm almost entirely certain, never intended for people to eat any human babies. Not even Irish ones.
Similarly, I don't actually think that agnostics are the worst people in the history of the world. Of course I don't. As a matter of fact, I suspect that some of them are perfectly adorable. The thing is that, being who I am and doing what I do, occasionally I come across agnostics who insist that agnostics are the smartest people ever, smarter than religious people and also smarter than atheists. This aggravates me, not only for the sake of myself and my fellow atheists but also for the sake of the religious believers I know who happen to be much brighter than the agnostics who claim to be the pinnacle of human intellect. That actual pinnacle doesn't hold very many people, and the number of people claiming to be the pinnacle is of course many times greater than the people who actually are (Newsflash, morons: if you're actually extremely intelligent, you don't have to tell people that you are. They can tell.), and so most of the people claiming to be the state of the art in brains, whether they're agnostic, atheist or religious, are just smug clueless swine, and I deal with my frustration with them by coming to this blog and being a big silly poopy-head myself, and I make myself laugh and hopefully I make a couple of other people laugh as well, and the world continues to spin.
Similarly with Buddhists. I get along fine with some of them. Unless we start to talk about Buddhism, and they claim that their religion is not actually a religion. There are no Buddhist gods! they insist. What-everrr! The Dalai Lama and, oh, for instance, the Buddha are treated as at least demi-gods by many Buddhists, and the Buddhists who say they're not religious are just in denial. And no, Buddhists, I don't want to debate that with you, any more than I want to debate the Virgin Birth with a conservative Catholic, and for very similar reasons.
Which of course in no way means I can't get along with you otherwise, or with that conservative Catholic, for that matter.
It might be too late for me ever to be friends with the commenter I offended with my previous post, and that would be unfortunate. But there might be a chance, if that person realizes that that post was meant as a (greatly exaggerated) description of my own personal experience, and that I don't believe, nor did I wish to imply, that my opinion about that nightclub scene in The French Connection is more important than anybody else's opinion. If that person enjoys a recording which I don't enjoy, well then God in Whom I don't believe bless them and that's that. Well no, actually that's not that. Sometimes I'm the lucky one, the one who gets it and is moved by a piece of music which a lot of other people only sneer at: at those massive jams in Phil Collins' "Sussudio" and "Take Me Home," at "Disco Inferno," at ABBA, at Miles Davis playing "Time After Time." They sneer, and they're wrong, I know that they're wrong and that I'm the lucky one, because I can actually hear it, and that's that. Am I going to turn right around and say somebody is wrong because they say they can hear something wonderful that I don't hear? No way. Not in a million years. I will not assume that I'm not completely missing something. And as far as this blog is concerned, I'm neither a record exec nor a music critic nor even a particularly gifted musician, I'm just a clown who now and then chooses to be very, very silly, who, nine times out of ten, given the choice, would much rather make someone smile than be taken seriously. I am The Wrong Monkey. Hear me roar!
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