Watering: The A.V. Club, Patrick Klepek

Watering entries are personal diaries, alluding to this post's conclusion. They are a potpourri of recent thoughts and experiences (one might even call them a blog, if one were to be so common), published when I have no other projects to work on, in order to ensure I've written something for the day.

I wonder if I should create a "Fuck The A.V. Club" post label. It's a sentence I think disproportionately often compared to how much of their stuff I actually read. I don't know if it will come up regularly.

Can't quite tease that last sentence into a joke about their staff having trendy bouts of New York City bulimia, so I'll just move on.

I am open to correction, but The A.V. Club bothers me initially because I find something pretentiously indulgent about its genesis. While yes, it existed nominally prior to The Onion's Internet presence and installation in the mainstream, it didn't earn its sententious identity until it finally came to fruition in the last decade. And that was seemingly only a result of funneling the well-meaning hip, young audience of The Onion into a charmlessly sincere and ostentatious cesspool of yuppie bohemia. I've seen the site refer to The Onion as its sister, rather than its parent. That's the sort of thing that gets my goat, and I'm not even an Onion fan.

So, I bring this up because I was searching for information on what is happening between Chevy Chase and Community, hoping to find confirmation that his character was being killed off. I was led to this article, which prompted yet another Watering entry, meaning I probably won't actually get to another Life in Song before the countdown to realizing it was a rash and very bad idea reaches zero.

I want someone to tell Sean O'Neil that putting the word "feud" in quotation marks doesn't actually spare you the indignity of covering a Hollywood feud. I know that after Rachel Maddow criticized chest-beating, pugilistic political headlines it's unfashionably masculine to treat an animosity between two people as an animosity between two people but you don't get to have your cake and eat it while writing an incendiary gossip column and maintaining the prideful insistence that "no one really feuds, this isn't pro wrestling," just because you threw down some dissociative punctuation.

In the article, O'Neal uses the "feud" once normally (must have slipped by the editor) and twice thereafter in quotes. He uses it, in quotes, a further two times in his follow-up. Who is he ostensibly quoting? Deadline? Himself, having allowed the word to originally escape naked, shivering the cold winter without its protective coat of irony? To hell with that. He admits further down that he perpetuates (I'd say "peddles") gossip, but with the same textual smirk of nonconfrontational nonconformity.

Fuck The A.V. Club.

Dreamed the other night about Patrick Klepek of Giant Bomb. A lot of issues there, although in finding that link I did see that he is a year older than me, so that's one issue resolved? I had dreams, years ago, about Anthony Burch. This probably isn't normal. Can't decide whether these unrequited astral connections are more or less emotionally harrowing with male gaming journalists than with the standard imaginary night sylphs. Dreams about those I envy make me feel sycophantic, insecurely reverent. Patrick was nice to me, we shared a chocolate pastry.

There's projection and other problems in this post, hovering like flies over my forthcoming Player Character column. I accused Sean O'Neil of being incendiary and not copping to it - a very apparent theme in Rebel Yell, in which I reiterate a number of times that I hope not to offend (most of) the people I mention, then proceed to indict them from my little computer chair. As well, admitting to envying the "them" about whom I write might not be any sort of revelation, but it could undermine the point I try to make.

I hope the column stands.