Meditations Over Cigars

The staff of Dominion of Cool was sitting in a local cigar shop the other night, down in the parlor area, puffing on a few shamefully cheap domestic stogies with all the smug confidence of those puffing on expensive imports, and we got to talking about this thing we do. This blog. How to account for it, and how to describe it?

DOC Staffer #1: ~~ (Sudden, quick burst of smoke from lips) ~~ It's sort of like the human digestive tract. Stuff comes in, is processed, and gets turned into waste. The bi-product of brain digestion can take many forms, and in our case it seems best suited to blogging. So "Dominion of Cool" is our brains taking a shit. ~~ (Ashes cigar into tray, presumably to underscore argument) ~~

DOC Staffer #2: But waste is such an ugly and inconvenient thing. I'd like to think this blog is worth people's time whether they realize it or not. If not for insight and character, at least for entertainment. ~~ (Long, dramatic puff followed by equally dramatic exhale) ~~ I think of it as a kind of odd little museum display. An esoteric construction that involves the time and passion - indeed, it could be said, even the very heart and soul - of the creaters, but with limited appeal to the public at large. None of which lessens its significance, but rather is only to suggest that the value of the thing, while not strictly intrinsic as such, is limited to a select and privelidged crowd who "get it."

DOC Staffer #3: ~~ (Series of short puffs followed by rapid consecutive smoke plumes) ~~ It's a savage little midget with a lazy eye who wants to chew off your balls and take you out at the knees with a lead pipe.

DOC Staffer #2: Why would he want to do that? Is his reasoning that the physical pain he is inflicting upon you is the equivalent of the psychological pain he suffers because of what society would deem his "abnormalities"?

DOC Staffer #3: (Shrugs) He's an angry prick. What do you want from me?

DOC Staffer #4: ~~ (Inhales for what seems an eternity, and then exhales -- only no smoke comes out, and this really creeps out DOC Staffers #1-3) ~~ It's a self-absorbed schitzophrenic with obsessive compulsive disorder.

DOC Staffer #1: Okay ... in what way?

DOC Staffer #4: It is self-absorbed because it doesn't give a good fuck who is reading and what they are thinking about it, or whether they are entertained or not. It cares only that this blog alleviates some of its own boredom, and more importantly it gets a huge kick out of itself - which is to say the entertainer is simultaneously the entertained. ~~ (Suddenly coughs, and all that smoke from before comes billowing out, taking, strangely enough, the shape of Don Knotts) ~~ It is schitzophrenic because it refers to itself as a "staff" when it is, truthfully, only one person. Me. However, it is one person that wears a lot of different masks. For instance, DOC Staffer #1 is the bottom-liner, no-horseshit straight-talker. He calls them as he sees them, and we all know that this blog has never been one to pussy-foot around issues with any degree of delicacy. DOC Staffer #2 is the reflective, quite often pompous intellectual - always prepared with eloquent diction and valuable insights, but continuously undermines his own credibility by taking things too far. DOC Staffer #3 is the rotweiller. He is the snarling, slobbering fangs of the group. The one who is not only ready for a fight, but who wants one bad enough to the point where he will launch grenades into peoples' homes just to start one.

DOC Staffer #1: Then what are you?

DOC Staffer #4: Me? ~~ (Chews the end of his cigar without puffing, hoping this effect will make him look wise) ~~ I'm the meta-blogger. I'm the awareness of the blog as a blog. I'm the disease and the prescription, the doctor and the patient. I'm an abstract speaker of pointed things, and a direct speaker of complicated things. I am, gentleman, the artifice of the construct.

DOC Staffer #3: You're a doosch bag.

DOC Staffer #2: And where, pray, does the OCD bit come into play, as you stated before?

DOC Staffer #4: Ah yes, the obsessive trait. Well, that one is obvious to us, but not necessarily to the readers, if indeed there are any. For instance, as of the period at the end of this sentence we've been working on this for half an hour. Why? If there are readers, they'll skim over it in less than a minute, maybe get a chuckle, and move on with their shallow lives. Why spend half an hour doing this? Because this blog is obsessive in its passion for detail. Take this very contrivance for instance ... it started out as a harmless bit of comedy, and somehow turned into a developed dialogue between four distinctly different characters, all with very different personalities and individual voices, all of which had to be planned and carefully manipulated into fruition. The comedy aspect was not jetisoned, naturally, and needed to be worked in as well ... hence the funny insults, and the random inexplicables like when no smoke came out after I took a puff. ~~ (Takes a puff and this time smoke comes out) ~~ There again. You see? And of course, there was the usual attention to sentence structure and organization, pacing for maximum effect, and that most important of writerly maxims ... the undying "le mot just"!!

DOC Staffer #2: Ah, the "perfect word" as it were.

DOC Staffer #1: We knew that.

DOC Staffer #3: And if they didn't, fuck 'em.

DOC Staffer #4: There's the obsessiveness again. That little interjection was because of our control-freak need to make sure the reader knew exactly what we were talking about. But it had to be done as part of the dialogue, which takes it to another level of obsessiveness. Why couldn't we just have put "the perfect word" in parenthesis? Or even just said it straight out in the first place?

Then there's also the physical showmanship of the thing. For instance, will the reader know that initially the ~~'s before the cigar-smoking descriptions were originally typed in as --'s? No. Will they know that we went back and changed them to ~~'s because we thought it kind of resembled drifting smoke? No. Will it even occur to them that this is what it's supposed to resemble? No, nor are they meant to, for we intended that as a sub-conscious suggestion. One of those subtle flourishes that improve the overall quality without even once drawing attention to itself. And if it fails completely, does that stop us? No. Why? Because we are OBSESSIVE!!!!

Cigar shop owner: You boys are going to have to take it outside. Some sophisticated fellas just came in and bought real cigars, and they need these chairs to smoke them.

DOC Staffer #1: Ours are real cigars! ~~ (Puffs furiously on cigar to prove point) ~~

Cigar shop owner: Pardon me. I meant they bought the kinds of cigars that men of taste and grooming purchase with the money that is actually in their wallets. Not strawberry swisher sweets like you boys spent a whopping few singles on.

DOC Staffer #3: Fuck you, Eichmann.

The night, as can be expected any time the Staff of the Dominion of Cool goes out together, ended badly, with plenty of bruised egos and every more badly bruised bones.

THE END!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!