A Disquisition on Hypocrisy

    Today, I wrote something so gross that I felt a little sick afterwards. I’m not going to say what it is here, because it’s too gross and I don’t feel like writing those words again, but there you have it.

    Sometimes I wonder what kind of writer I am. How much of this am I doing consciously? I’ve been writing since before I can remember. You know all those people who just told you you had to find your voice? I’m not sure I ever had that problem. I mean, like every writer, I imitated others a lot, especially when I was a teenager. Maybe it’s that I worry I’m still doing that, in a weird way.

    But when I find myself writing, as I was today, about a man in a pirate costume and his weird friend in a Superman costume hooking up with a teenaged boy in a pot-filled suburban garage (that wasn’t the gross thing), I wonder — is that something I’ve been doing all along? I never made a conscious choice that I was going to do low humor and commercialism-mocking irony. It just happened.

    I’ve found myself writing, again, about how gross I find the culture of fandom in modern American society. I worry I’m getting a little one-note about it. And it opens me to charges of hypocrisy, because I’m a fan of a lot of things. But I’m not really worried about being called a hypocrite, mostly because, as far as I know, every person in the world is one. The only honest people are ones who are all just like, “Hey, I’m shitty. Deal with it, and I’ll never try to be anything else.

    From Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age:

“We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. “In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception---he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing."

    Anyway, let this serve as a warning. If and when my book hits the shelves, if you don’t wanna get grossed out, don’t read the part about pantsless Santa Clauses on the A train.