theme word: stupidity, title: stupidity tries in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Stupidity is an under-rated characteristic, at least at the beginning of your journey, at least in the entertainment business, especially in Los Angeles. It helps to start off stupidly, stupid as hell, a cartoonish idiot, because you have to be a damned moron to believe you’ll succeed as an actor, as a musician, especially as a writer. There’s only so many slots out there, it’s sadly a zero-sum game, and most of them are going to already rich-or-famous folks’ lovers or kids. You need be uniquely innocent in ignorance to think you’ll be the exception.

The problem with going to school for commercial arts, getting your bachelors or masters, is that when you learn all the theory and process behind the thing you’re trying to do, you’re left with the diagnostics to understand how your particular vision is worthless and imperfect and they’re all going to laugh at you so don’t even try. Literary theory teaches you how you’ll never live up to the masters, film theory teaches you how you’ll never be able to both live up to those masters and actually sell your products, music theory teaches you how to over-think song into frozen-up anxious oblivion. All in all, it’s better to start out an idiot.

Wise men say only fools rush in, yes, that’s why wise men stand at the edges shuffling their feet while the foolish go out and get things done. Well, sure, most of us fools fail miserably for our crushing foolishness, of course, but a few of the foolish slip through the cracks into the promised land, just by sheer temerity, by bald tenacity, on the strength of how astonishingly dumb-ass they are. All the wise-men, every one of them, fail because they never try at all.

If you’re lucky and your timing’s right, maybe you’ll start off stupid enough to try, get your foot in the door when moronic enough to think you have a shot at all, and then get amazing as you go along. It’s how the Beatles did it, how the Simpsons did it. You start off roaring rough-shod but once you’re established, you actually become great along the way, at least for a while. For some blessed tiny window, you can make amazing art and make bank doing it, all because you started out too stupid to know not to give yourself a chance.

It’s hideous stupid to think you’ll be in pictures with your name up in lights but a lucky few pull it off because they didn’t know any better to start. It’s robustly moronic to think folks would pay money to hear you noodle on your poorly-tuned guitar, but some folks become stars anyway.

No one sane would want to read your story about meeting a sasquatch at the corner of Sunset and Gower but some of us are just too dumb than to not persist. Stupidity above all else always tries. Stupidity tries until the day you succeed or the day that you die.

Last updated June 17, 2019