Stupid

Someone smart once said “Always be the dumbest person in the room.” I forget who said it, but it’s crucial to development. Being perceived as “dumb” means that those around you will spend more time teaching you, and you will learn faster than anybody else. And it’s really fun to be dumb sometimes, ask crazy questions, do crazy things, act a fool. Craziness is a trait of intelligence, those bold enough to act and think are the smartest heroes among us. It’s not the kid in the library working day and night on his chemistry lab, or the teacher at Harvard who took 20 years to get a PhD, and it’s not even the kid with the glasses who’s always got a laptop open with crazy javascript on it. The smartest people are those who are wild, who say weird things, who stand out because they don’t act like anybody else, they just are.

Lately I’ve been trying to figure out who I am. Brandon Dcruz, who is he? It’s my last year at RIT and I’ve gotta start finding employment because I’m broke as hell. And I’ve got a lot of opportunities in front of me: there’s a few advertising jobs in Rochester that need Google AdSense knowledge, there’s a dude out in Texas who runs a film company and has worked with DJ Khaled and thinks I’m a “true artist,” there are job fairs and web dev jobs, there are films that needs scores, etc. I’ve been flying for four years through college trying to learn everything I can, absorbing knowledge, twiddling my thumbs in entrepreneurship classes, tedx meetings, band rehearsals, I’ve just done a lot. I try to do new things whenever I can, because that feeling of being in an unusual environment, communicating differently with people who think differently, I like to live in the present and be in the new.

So, like all people trying to find themselves, I’ve been listening to lots of Radiohead and drinking lots of Genesee and meditating. I started doing yoga, it’s for the wellness part of my degree. I really like it, stretching and breathing and turning and moving the air to your stomach. I didn’t really understand meditation until I started doing that, just breathing into my stomach as if I’m sleeping. It works, I feel better than I have in years.

But I still don’t know who the fuck I am. And really, does anybody know who they are? Nobody has ever even seen themselves, only reflections in cameras and mirrors. How can you know who you are if you can’t even see yourself? I’ve been thinking about the Allegory of the Cave too. It’s that story about the people who grow up in a cave from birth, chained to a wall, watching the opposite cave side unable to move. And there’s a bridge above them, where people walk and talk and their shadows project onto the opposite wall, so these chained up people perceive those black figures as reality. One day, one dude breaks free from his chains, and he runs outside and sees a tree and doesn’t believe that the tree is reality because all his life he’s only known black shadows. I forget how it ends :) I’m simplifying it all a bit too, but it’s a poignant piece. In recent times, lots of people have theorized that life is a simulation. It’s a wild theory, how do you know for sure that everything around you is real? Can your senses be trusted? You think therefore you are, but how can you know for certain that other people think too? What is real, who is there, where are you?

Woah, slow down kiddo

Anyways, I think I’ve found a way to find out who you are, at least a little bit. Even if everything is fake, and the world is just an orb of light and reflections, there’s an undeniable force between humans. We love, fight, kiss, slap, shoot, fuck, use, teach, and play with each other. We talk in all sorts of languages and dialects and give meaning to all kinds of random things. The movie theater of your first date, your best friend’s favorite flower, books and vinyl, we give them meaning and spread the energy to others, often times without thinking. If I make a joke in public, and a passerby hears it and thinks its funny, I’ve passed my energy to them and I don’t even know. There must be hundreds of thousands of expressions and memories that you’ve given to hundreds of thousands of people you will never know.

I’m not a physics major, but I had a really good teacher back in high school. Mr. Miller, what a guy. On the first day of class he asked me in front of the entire class “Brandon, why is the sky blue?” And I, like the humorous human being I am, replied “On the third day, God created the heavens.” Miller didn’t laugh. He went on to talk about reflections, how some people think it’s because most of the world is water and the blue color of the oceans are reflecting upwards, but he dismissed it saying that water isn’t usually blue. It’s a perception. Honestly, I forget why the sky is actually blue, but that concept of reflections is really cool to me because I think energy between humans works the same way.

If you’ve ever performed in a band, you’ll get it. Whatever instrument you play, when you play with others, once everybody’s got the piece down, you communicate through phrases and repeats and licks and fills. Once you’re good enough, improvisation will just happen, and you’ll notice that the effort, the energy you put into your instrument is reflected by your bandmates without any thought or intention, just call and response. Action and reaction, like a ping pong game. And then the crowd reflects it back, screaming moshing dancing. And you’ll just play, it’s more than muscle memory, it’s an expression. Give and take relationships between everybody in the room. And you’ll look up from your drumset and smile at the rhythm guitarist and you’ll understand that energy is just like light, it moves around and grows and fades and connects people together like a velcro belt. Just as light is perceived through your eyes, energy is perceived through your emotions. When you cry, those around you feel sad. When you laugh, others laugh with you even if the joke is shitty. When you love, others try to match that love, sometimes to an unhealthy degree. Humans have this inherent longing to connect with each other, and it’s more powerful than many know.

That’s why I act a fool so often. I like making people laugh, and if they think I’m stupid, that’s ok because they’re happy. I’d rather people perceive me as a dumbass wacko than not notice me at all. I’d rather have people laugh with my stupidity than sit in silence, scrolling, double tapping. The people who I care about know I’m anything but stupid, they know I push things to limits to find new reactions and ideas. They know I can talk about my crippling depression and my love for Taco Bell in the same sentence. Someone’s gotta be the class clown, otherwise life gets real boring.

Anyways, if you’re trying to find out who you are, just look at those around you. Look in their eyes, at their lips, the way they fiddle with their hair or their shoes, their dialects, and most importantly, look at how they look back at you. Just like looking in a mirror, you’ll see yourself if you look close enough. And if you see someone stupid smiling back, someone that can’t be described through words, then you’re doing something right.

My song Bargain Bin is streaming everywhere now!

Here’s a short poem I wrote a few days ago, idk what to call it lol

free will is a for loop
for the early birds in the east
and the night owls on the right

and just as a lantern turns nothing into light
the universe is a couple playing spore on prom night

edit01 from a few weeks ago

We went over the library of babel in one of my classes today. If you don’t know what that is, here’s a couple links. Basically, the library of babel is a short story by Borges something I forget his name tbh anyways, it’s this infinitely large place that holds an infinite number of books, kinda. It’s got every single combination of every letter in the alphabet, along with the space comma and period characters. So there’s millions of books with just “hrksgsifjeis” but next to it you might find the first Harry Potter novel missing its penultimate chapter, and next to that there might be a book with 500 pages of the word “n**.” Oh and the library is made of hexagonal shaped rooms, with bookshelves on each wall. And there’s lamps that create people. The big idea is that this place represents the universe, with every single possible phrase, thought, tweet, comment, everything in this one infinite space.

If you go a bit further, you can kinda see how it represents the physical world. With the big bang, everything that ever could be popped into existence. People came along and turned trees into books and rocks into cups and whatever. But back to the library, the text. That idea that everything you could ever possibly say or think has already been created. That somewhere in that library there’s a book that has this exact blog post, fucking wild.

“But Brandon, the library of Babel isn’t real” Welcome to 2019 my guy it’s right here, bang search whatever you want and you can find it somewhere. Every one of your thoughts since birth is there. Every single text you’ve sent and sentence you’ve spoken since you were born is there. You’re not original. You’ve never been original. You can’t be original, at least with language anyways.

This makes me feel weird because I really care about originality. I hate mimicry, imitation, cover songs. I’ve always felt like you’ve only got one life, maybe 100 years, so why waste any second of that on other people’s work? Who are you? Because when you’re gone, what’s left? Your ukelele cover of Creep by Radiohead that’s what you want people to think about after your dead, come on man. Write something new, be someone bold, say something original. Well, I guess you can’t do that anymore. Or you never could, because everything that could be said or written already has been. Someone beat you to the big bang god dang punchline with everything ever that ever could be. Big yikes.

I quit my job at The Reporter the other day. I got a new job at Artesanos on campus. You probably never knew I wrote for The Reporter, that’s because I only wrote maybe 3 articles. Each of those took me hours and hours to research and interview and vision and write and they each only paid me 10 bucks. Big lol. Also everyone there is really obsessed with making stories out of nothing. I hate being mean, but some of their journalism is really shit. redacted because it got too mean lol

So if nothing can be original anymore, can I get mad at other people’s work that I find boring because they cover ideas I’ve already thought about? I mean yeah, I can get mad at whatever I want. It’s that idea of meaning, we talked about it in class. If I write “Altona Meadows is sick” what does that mean? Am I saying the city in Victoria, Australia has come down with swine flu? Or maybe I mean that the place is cool. Meaning comes with context, language is just something humans came up with to communicate with each other, so without somebody else giving you meaning, you’ll never understand anything. In that case I meant that my band, Altona Meadows, is dope and you should check it out here. I’ve given that noun meaning, it’s no longer just a place, to those who know about it, it’s also me.

I’m 21 now btw. For my birthday I got really drunk at my old band’s gig and yelled a lot of dumb shit at a lot of strangers. It was wild! This is my year of giving 0 fucks. It’s my year where I am finally bound by no rules, I’m an adult and I’m ready to leap into the sky. I’ve already done a whole lot by now, so I’m gonna keep moving. See how crazy I can get. How many people I can piss off. How many songs I can write. How many jobs I can find. Ngl, I’m terrified. How can you not be terrified in this world? I feel like a little kid. Like a kid in an arcade, playing at a game machine he can’t afford. Just trying to get on the leader board so he can get “DIK” up on that list, because why not lol. What do you say when everything’s already been said? Well, you don’t say anything at all.