A Little Bit Sad

I don’t believe in guilty pleasures in the traditional sense. I like what I like and I’ll tell you if you ask. I don’t care if you make fun of me for listening to Lady Gaga or finding a sort of dorky beauty in Napoleon Dynamite. It’s what I like, I’m a grown man, I don’t have to preface my interests with “It’s a guilty pleasure…..” translation: “I’m self conscious you won’t think I’m as cool if I told you what I REALLY like”

I do have a different kind of guilty pleasure though. This time of my own definition. This guilty pleasure is literally so because I feel guilty for spending whatever amount of time I spent on it. Literal, actual, guilt. I’m sorry I forgot to water your plants while you were on vacation and they died guilt.

This guilt lives on Reddit. A site declaring itself “The Front Page of The Internet” and I believe accurately so. I believe they could go a step farther and say “The Front Page of YOUR Internet” because it is made of a countless number of sub-categories called “Subs” for anything and everything you can imagine. This site is sort of the rule 34 of things you could possibly be interested in. If you like it, there is no doubt is a “sub” for it. So much so there is a sub made up entirely of posts about the bizarre often mind boggling variety of subs that exist called “Of Course It’s a thing” or r/ofcoursethatsathing in reddit verse.

* A link to something that plays every episode of “The Simpsons” simultaneously.

* a sub reddit devoted to spiders in erotic positions

* Mallsoft (or Mallcore) - a subgenre of vaporwave inspired by elevator music meant to evoke the feeling of being in a mall

* An unironic sub for organizing meet ups for anti-social people

* Lego French Fries

* A magazine (yes they still print them) devoted entirely to Fidget Spinners

* Mail Me to the GOP - a website that will send your cremated remains to the GOP if you die because of your health insurance being changed

* Officially Licensed Air Guitar strings

* r/SaveBrendan an entire sub dedicated to resurrecting the career of actor Brendan Fraser.

* r/Counting literally people taking turns posting the next number in a sequence

And a couple strange ones I actually came to enjoy

* r/WtssTaDaMiT an acronym for the surprisingly erotic and tasteful When. the. Sun. Shines. Through. a. Dress. And. Makes .it Translucent.

And

* r/DesirePath “A desire path (also known as a desire line, social trail, goat track or bootleg trail) can be a path created as a consequence of foot or bicycle traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width of the path and its erosion are indicators of the amount of use the path receives. Desire paths emerge as shortcuts where constructed ways take a circuitous route, or have gaps, or are lacking entirely.”

THAT is a mouthful and yet an entire community of folks are devoted to it, posting pictures of new found “Desire Paths” daily. This isn’t my guilty pleasure, and actually I didn’t find it on r/ofcourseitsathing. Instead it came to me as a question on one of the default subs, askReddit; subs that you are automatically a member of or at least initially are when you sign up for a free reddit account. Things pretty much everyone is into, like r/pictures, r/funny, and r/awesome. These starter set subs have a name in the reddit verse but I can’t recall it at the moment.

The question came to me in AskReddit. Finally, my guilty pleasure. Remember when we were talking about that? No? Well I’m sure their is a sub devoted to forgetting things in blogs…..anyway.

The question was simply “Why do I find ‘r/DesirePath’ so enjoyable?” Like most things on the internet, and Reddit is no exception, I assumed it to be pornographic so I tepidly gave it a gander. Relieved, I responded something like “Don’t spend too much time trying to figure out why you enjoy something, just enjoy it.” A good answer but as I sit here I’ll be damned if I could tell you why I like that sub either.

Like any other question on askReddit this question couldn’t be answered with a quick “Yes” or “No”, didn’t use the textbox (for which the mods are quite militant about), and some other rules I can't remember.

Just like everything else these days gamification is used to add an unnecessarily unfair spice to the mix. You get points based on how popular a post of yours is, or your comment on a post. Of course you can “upvote” or “downvote” a post or comment too. The result is everyone racing to make it to the front page of whatever sub they are on. AskReddit’s competition can be quite brutal.

That clickbait about “20 things Cops admit to doing on the job” your Aunt emailed you this morning? It was probably just yesterday’s top askReddit question. Sometimes they don’t even bother stripping the reddit formatting off said articles.

I’m addicted to askReddit. Not so much concerned with racking up points, but answering questions. Yeah, it hurts when I get downvoted or get responses that are mean, but I’ve built up quite a tolerance for it. I guess that is another good thing I hadn’t thought of.

Question after question, some don’t apply some do, but I just can’t stop and I feel guilty for just how long I’ve been answering questions.

Instead of going to the front page where the upvotes and posts are in the thousands or tens of thousands, no one is going to see your post there, I always spam the “new” button. These are the freshest questions and they never stop. Eventually I do, but not before I feeling guilty for lost time.

Sure some good has come from it. I believe I legitimately helped a young man think of mutual interest to ask a friend of his out with, and how and when to do it. I got zero karma (the tally of upvotes) out of the deal but I felt like I helped him.

One question stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t answer it right away. Not the best question in the world but it stopped me, and stuck in my memory days later and unfortunately I found the answer. The question was “What do you find a little bit sad?”

I didn’t have an answer and I can’t remember if I saved it. You can save posts if you like. I do so when I have nothing to contribute but still want to know how a blind guy knows when to quit wiping his ass or a question similarly interesting. Those questions take time to bloom though, so I save them for later, like checking a net I’d thrown overboard hours earlier. Sometimes you get a bumper crop and sometimes you get nada.

Switching gears quickly. When I work from home I often stand for the conference call that is my morning meeting. We all say what we’re going to do that day and I only have to pay attention enough to know when it’s my turn to talk. As I did so over the spring I noticed a happy little play set. Consisting of waterways and bridges and a crane on my deck. It had a truck, boat and a piece of bulky child safe plastic cargo that could fit in either and be moved about by the crane. Stop lights made of stickers to tell the truck or boat when to go or stop. A bridge for the truck to go over the water and little stopping arms to make little locks for the boat.

Rain water normally made the boat float and I always vowed to play with it with my daughter or even by myself. Back to the original guilty pleasure definition…...I don’t care if you think I’m three decades too old, that shit looked like fun.

After the call is over I would go back to my desk and hammer away at work for nine hours and forget all about the little boat.

One day not long ago I peered over the deck after pacing about as I often do. I don’t smoke or have any other reason to go outside, but I still like it out there, so I pace. Down in what used to be a rose bush area were the various pieces of the play set. Abandoned in the dirt and soon to be forgotten about. I got a little bit sad and finally found my answer.

My calls to work are now a little bit sad. I don’t know where the set came from, I don’t know how it got knocked clear across the deck and onto the ground below and I don’t know if it ever got played with, but life goes on.

As an adult who is married to a wife that runs a daycare I’m no stranger to derelict toys; Barbie shoes without a match, tiny chairs and closets and all sorts of things that hurt like hell when you step on them, but this set,....this set was different.

I remembered how lost or broken toys filled me with sadness as a child. I tried to be good, but I was a kid, that’s what they do. To this day I’m really hard on stuff no matter how careful I am.

I suppose it’s good the little dock’s ultimate fate is now just  “a little sad” to me as an adult. I’ve grown, I’ve gotten tougher. Just like my skin in those particularly nasty barbed comments directed at me in askReddit. Speaking of which I’m at my laptop and askReddit is just a tab away and I’m starting to get the shakes.

For pictures of the crane in (before and after) check out the official twitter: @The SmittyBlog