Experimental History

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2025-01-09 18:00:04

Experimental History has just turned three. In blog years, that makes me old enough to light up a cigar and wax wise. And so, on my blog birthday, I wanna tell you about the two stupid facts I’ve learned in my time on the internet:

These truths are so obvious that nobody even notices them, which is exactly why they’re so potent, and why they keep coming in handy over and over again. Lemme show you how.

When I got my first piece of hate mail, it felt like someone had lobbed a grenade through my front window. Someone’s mad at me?? I gotta skip town!!

But the brute logic of the Two Stupid Facts means that if you reach enough people, eventually you’re gonna bump into someone who doesn’t like what you’re doing. Haters are inevitable and therefore non-diagnostic—being heckled on the internet is like running a blood test and discovering that there’s blood inside of you.

I was once at a standup show where everybody was laughing except for one guy in the front row who, for some reason, had a major stick up his butt. After sitting stone-faced for half an hour, the guy eventually just got up and stormed out. The comic didn’t miss a beat. “Well, it’s not for everybody,” he said, and kept right on going.