DECONSTRUCTING ME - REFERENCES

DECONSTRUCTING ME - REFERENCES

I guess this is a series in which I reflect on myself and what exactly makes me the person who I am by dissecting myself. It'll be a series, in which I'll probably post a description in better detail as to why I am doing it - who knows, maybe that'll come out sooner than this one, because, after all, time is just a flat circle, but it's just going to focus on a little bit of myself to see how or why I am the way I am. For better or worse on it all.

Today I'll focus on a bit of the referetial aspect that I seem to live my life with. I guess it can all be pinpointed to Dr. Demento. Much like a lot of why I am the way I am. It's because Dr. Demento. That show had a big impact in my childhood that I probably need to go into more detail about some time.

But aside from having the format that Weird Al got his start at, they had a lot of news segments that had sound blips as the responses for an on location interview, such as this..


I always thought that was amazing and creative. So much that I would collect them a lot on cassette. Then when we entered the digital age of really slow ass computers, I would record sound files and it would be a lot easier to pull them up for references. It helped that growing up I was constantly playing strategic memory games. The type that would have a locked door that you had to go retrieve a key from the other side of the map that you saw earlier to then come back and unlock it - only to go and use what you found in that locked area for some future goal. So I had a very large visual memory in my head about keeping a running inventory on what I saw and where I saw it.

With the midi, wav and other audio sound files I would string them together to make responses. I mean, I guess one of the aspects to my upbringing was that I was very quiet of a kid. I was one of those who grew up with the mentality that kids should be seen and not heard. On top of that, I had a lot of speech issues growing up. My voice would crack like crazy, I would have a speech impediment. The way my mind works for reading items is also a little strange because of these learning issues. I'm still pretty awful at actually sounding out how we're suppose to sound out in this stupid English contradictory language. So while I grasped the meaning and comprehension, I really did lack the ability to execute the sounding out of shit. On top of that, I had a strange knack to just read the first few letters in a word and just auto fill the rest of it.

Anyhow, not to dive too deep into the world of my fucked up childhood, but you can see that the paragraph above was reason enough that I wanted and cherished the fact that someone or something else could do the talking for me. To convey what I wanted to express, but was so deeply afraid to go out on the limb and attempt to do so because of fear of doing it wrong. Soundboards like the Arnold one were something I loved.

Basically all this was just building a cache of referential source material in my mind for my entire upbringing. Think and pulling from my memory in which that statement or phrase or some good come back to use could be beneficial in whatever given situation.

Flash forward to today. Animated gifs... Oh, I love using them because it uses a lot of visual and scripted words to express how I am feeling or how I can be a smart ass and respond to a question, comment or statement pulling from known references. After all, I think the biggest aspect of my humor is in fact that referential aspect of pulling out and drawing from a funny memory.

So when people say that I am on top of my game when it comes to using animated gifs or even getting a reference down that would have some meaning, it's because I have had a life time of doing exactly that.