What the fuck do you want to do with that thing you call your life?

Yeah, so that's a fairly straightforward question: What is it you want to do by the time you finally expire? I suppose some people are happy with raising children, while others want to do something so that people know they existed. Others just want to lead a happy life, whatever that is. Hell, there might even be the occasional borderline crazy who went into molecular biology in college with the hope of somehow figuring out how to live forever.

So what is it you hope to do?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I want to be a rock superstar, be a published writer, be able to speak five languages and have a sockload of money.

But, I think I'll settle for my master's degree and a decent-sized family.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

whoo...
I don't really know. I've thought about it, and there are some things that I would like to do that are out of the scope of reality (like beat the time record for climbing Mt. Everest [8hr 19 min]) and then there are some things that I know I have to do to have a fulfilled life...namely having kids, and working to make the world a better place. As for my personal goals...well...I don't want to get ahead of my self. I only know that I want to work hard and save money so I can travel.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

travel? what for? you can pretty much see the whole freakin world while sitting on the couch.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Alunima

travel? what for? you can pretty much see the whole freakin world while sitting on the couch.

Yeah, I'm trying to be nice here, but you're so wrong it hurts. You can see scenery, you an learn about the people of the world, you can even learn how to live wherever you'd like with whomever you'd like, but if you think that's really experiencing the world...

Well, you're an idiot. You'll never meet the people of this great wide world from your couch, you'll never find any real connection with them through your TV. You can't shake any hands, or share any drinks, while sitting down. If all you want to see in your life are the four walls that surround you now, then someone has lied to you about what exactly "this life" is. That, or you're a total moron.

But this is all off topic, and for that I apologize. I'll get back o nthe wagon now.

I want to do everything. I want to get so drunk I forget a whole portion of the week, and I want to taken part in things so ridiculous during that week that even I would balk while sober. That takes care of a few things. For the rest of the time though? I always wanted to skydive, bungie, wrestle a bear, be a wise old man, pull a Robin Hood, stand up for something right, forgive and forget, and be at peace with myself.

I also want to be a rockstar, and a published writer, and an astronaut, and a leader. Those will be a little harder though, take a little more time. It'll happen though, I'm convinced. I guess a family would be nice too, but that's actually pretty low on the list, believe it or not. Thanks for asking.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Become a teacher, travel some of the world, such as Asia and Europe, settle down somewhere in the world for a while, then come back to Canada. Have kids, race dirt cars, own a track possibly. Then retire in Vancouver, BC.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Travel the world, mainly Europe and Asia. This is something that I have always wanted to do.
Having a family doesn't really appeal to me at the minute, but one day, maybe.

Nothing much else I can think of at the minute.

Most amazing jew boots

I want to be a rockstar. I seriously need to start making steps towards that goal.

If that doesn't work out, I'd be happy working as a translator or on a Localization team at a game company.

How ya doing, buddy?

I want to visit Rio de Janeiro and Japan. I want to write and publish an anthology of short stories. I want to make some documentaries. I want to run my own online comic book shop.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I have a pretty straightforward plan... get a degree in education, become a teacher so I have some kind of stable job/salary, and then take whatever professional performing gigs I can - acting, singing, whatever. Maybe do some novel-writing. Love the stage, and love corrupting the minds of today's youth.

Hooray responsibility! Hooray beautiful beer!

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Accumulate knowledge and play a fuckton of video games.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I want to be a surgeon.

No seriously...

I don't really care about being famous, I just want to get through med school and get my career started. Sometimes learning takes too long.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I want to live it.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Matt

I want to live it.

Do you want to get up and get out, too?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Write a bunch [novels, essays, plays, libretti, screenplays, liner notes, New Yorker articles, instruction manuals, etc.], and maybe own and run a non-for-profit publishing house that royally pampers its writers, myself included.

Oh, and if by some freak accident I also get to play a solo concert of the Rachmaninoff piano concerto no. 3 in Carnegie Hall, with the Bartok sonata, some Medtner Skazki, some Rzewski, Shostakovich and Scriabin in the second half of the program, with the live recording going on into posterity to be cited as revolutionary interpretations... well, then I'd probably seizure with happiness and spend the rest of my days in a mental asylum laughing uncontrollably.

FELIPE NO

I often ask myself this question, and, I'm often asked by other people as well. Primarily my dad asks me as to what my plans are with the remainder of my life.

Well, I don't know. I can't figure anything out, and I really don't have any desires at the moment pertaining to such a topic. As important as I've been told it to be, I'm at a point of uncaringness.

I'm currently in college trying to figure out what major to pursue. In a sense, I am secretly looking for something easy to tackle. Maybe it's sheer laziness, but I'm not up for tackling 25 page papers to write up. (Exaggerating of course). My dad tells me I possess artistic talent. I find cooking, piano playing, listening to music, drawing/painting, and being so damn organized to be somewhat enjoyable. I've never actually posted anything on these forums, so no one can actually confirm my talents. But, if you've ever read my chocojournal, I have made several music requests and just recently posted a bunch of instrumental junk. (Though, all wiped out now. Due to some new resolution).

What am I doing now? Studying BMS. Bio Molecular Science. Why? Because of how well I did in one stupid Chemistry course during my Sophmore year in high school. Is that a significant cause to fuel any hopes of pursuing a major in BMS? No. I used to believe it was. I used to believe that I had some kind of knack in science. That all crumbled upon completing my spring semester last May. Failed Chemistry, failed my intro class to Chemical & Biological Engineering, and still as hopeless and lost as ever.

So, what do I do now? I really wouldn't know. Before the board crash last March, I used to reply to topics in The Quiet Place involving problems other members have been having. Real life problems, academic, and other things in quite a variety of subjects. I don't know how many of you may even remember my old user name: JGK150, but thats what I went by before. To my surprise, many members found my advice extremely helpful. Several have even looked up my AIM info in my profile and sought more advice. So, could this maybe be something I can consider for a future career path? Maybe. But at the moment, I'm feeling lazy. So, where are all the easy things?

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Streetsweeping!


I honestly have no idea right now, because setting goals I won't reach'll just put me into a mid-life crisis (or at least make it worse).

I'd like to think I'd lose my stage-fright, be more of an aggressive/outgoing person, and learn to play the drums fluently (as opposed to not at all), and get in a meaningful relationship with a beautiful women that won't find me boring after a year, but I tend to think realistically.

Wow that sounded pretty angsty...I plan on accomplishing *some* shit, hopefully start a family, but aside from that im blank, and honestly I don't really think I should have much planned out just out of high school.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I want to get a job in Computer Networking (Going to college right now, hopefully studying for certification within six months), move somewhere nicer, and live well and secure. Maybe in that order, maybe no.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I want to travel, possibly write a book, learn another language, hold at least one piano concert, and raise a family.

I'm sure there's more, but I can't think of it at the moment.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Fresh Frank

Do you want to get up and get out, too?

Whatever motivates me, makes me.
In other words, if I am compelled to do something, I will do it.

Having goals and achieving them is something I'm compelled to do, sure. Do I have goals? Yes, we all have goals. Even if it is to die.
However my goals are not related to dying; my goals are to live my life in the way I see fit.
Ergo, to live it.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Ban him - he said Ergo.

I was speaking idiomatically.

My bad, I was getting all philosophical like so I felt obligated to.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Fresh Frank

I want to do everything. I want to get so drunk I forget a whole portion of the week, and I want to taken part in things so ridiculous during that week that even I would balk while sober. That takes care of a few things.

Yup. Sex with strangers and vandalism and vomiting are certainly some of the more precious things in life to experience.

Or did you mean you want "get so drunk that I sit around and play videogames with my other drunk friends"? Because you're trying to make it sound a lot more meaningful than it really is.

FELIPE NO

I'd like to become a writer of fiction. I'm not sure, but I think short stories would be ideal. Every time I work on this one novel idea, I stop because I realize I need to go back and fix something. I rarely go fix that item. It would be nice to write comics, but since I don't have an artist to draw my ideas, that prospect goes nowhere.

So, since I rarely devote myself to a story, I'm studying to become a teacher of mathematics. I heard in high school that such things are needed.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Has anyone here heard of Tucker Max (New York Times best selling author of "I Hope They Serve Better Beer in Hell")? In his website, tuckermax.com (the site that he uses to share hilarious stories), one of the threads in his forum covers a topic similar to this one here.

Hate him or idolize him, the guy is a genius and living proof that he discovered what he was ment to do with his life. His "destiny" you might say.

The thread can be found here: messageboard.tuckermax.com/showthread.php?t=9271&page=1

I think his second post really elaborates and highlights some of the key advice people should take when trying to discover where their own "destiny" lies. The post comes in two parts, the first part is from a fan asking Tucker about advice on what to do with his life and the second part with Tucker responding , drawing from his own personal experiences.

Originally Posted by Fan Email #2

Like every other asshole, I'm here thinking you should give a shit and offer some advice, simply because I threw down thirteen dollars and lurk your messageboard. The fact is it's the other way around. That amount of money doesn't come close to what I owe you.
I write this plea as efficiently as possible, as you undoubtedly have other shit to do and hardly have the time for another petty bullshit plea of a fan.

I went to a private prep school in New England that my parents could hardly afford to send me to, a fact I remained cognizant of when I looked at the shit-head trust-fund pretentious babies I went to school with. I vowed awhile ago that I would not let my future kids grow up like them [see your Nantucket story] I'm currently in between my junior and senior year of undergrad at a small, growing liberal arts/Jesuit school in Baltimore. This means a few things: I haven't gotten away from those fucking Dimeo-esque pussies and whores, and that Jesuit edge violently shoved me from moderate agnosticism to full-blown atheism; and lastly, this city sucks.

I had originally intended on being a Classics major, but as my high school Latin professor loves to remind me, I sold out and became a finance major after I realized the impracticality and lack of monetary-earning potential associated with being a classics major. [note: I added an econ minor last year after I read whatever story where you mention something about finance majors weren't good enough for econ] And right now,
I have no clue what I'm doing next with my life. Law school was originally an option, but you dissuaded me from that last year sometime. I have an internship with Morgan Stanley down here, and I, and my parents and family and whoever else were all totally happy about it, but for hilarity's sake I checked out Dimeo's site and read where he "worked." Fuck.

Why am I asking you what to do? You have that uncanny ability to say the things I've thought and couldn't express, and to do, amazingly, things I'm just OK at. More than the booze and the girls. I re-read Emerson's essay "The Poet" and all I could think of was you and your work and what's to come. Emerson asserts that the true artist speaks for the masses, the plebs. You, Maddox, most of your festeringass writers; you're today's transcendentalists. Obviously, my friends and I love the stories and the wit and the booze, but there's so much more. Some of my friends get it, some are fuckin' morons. My mindless days at work and class are spent thinking about getting home and lurking the message-board while I enjoy the first Natty Light of the evening. My personal reading list, while good at first, has gotten unbelievably better post tuckermax.com exposure. I also know that, not having yet seen my twenty-first birthday (one more month) and with these very narrow bits of life I've seen, I don't know shit.

And now, you're at the height of this fucking decentralized media revolution, with the ability and potential to hit a larger demographic than anyone ever has in the past, and it's fucking unbelievable. And while I'm sitting here enjoying it all...I don't have the balls at age 20 to get out of this predetermined, generally understood path I'm headed on. How the fuck do I do it? Well I understand your shit well enough to know the answer to that question, but do I have to wait for a "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything" moment? Maybe I need to stop bitching. Maybe I'll just get it eventually in like five years, doing that monkey-wall street-jungle thing, and quit the fake corporate world; but rather than make it to the Special Forces (I literally have flat feet, shit's fucked up) I'll join the Tucker Max Corporation.

Originally Posted by Tucker Max

Your whole rambling diatribe breaks down to this sentence, "I don't have the balls at age 20 to get out of this predetermined, generally understood path I'm headed on. How the fuck do I do it?"

First off, you should give yourself some credit. At least you know that you are stuck on a path you don't want to be on, the path that others have predetermined for you, and you recognize that it doesn't make you happy, and you want to do something about it. In order to fix something, you must first recognize where the problem lies, and you see that. Like Confuscious said, the longest journey begins with the first step, and you have taken it.

But don't start sucking your own dick quite yet. You have a decision to make; you can stay on that path and become a suit, just another numbered cog in the meaningless corporate bullshit world, slowly dying one day at a time in a job you hate doing work no one cares about...or you can choose life. Before you do read anything else, you have to decide: What kind of person am I going to be? Before I can show you how to reach your dreams, you have to decide if you even want to go after them. If you just have a general malaise about your job prospects or your life, well thats super, go drink a fucking beer and shut the fuck. But if you actually want to change something, if you want to get off the shitty path that you are on and get onto one that you like, only then should you keep reading. Make no mistake about it, this is a decision you are making, whether its conscious or not, about how you are going to live your life.

If you decide that you do in fact want to get off the path you are now on, the next thing you must recognize is that if you want to find your personal destiny and achieve happiness, you have an incredibly hard road ahead of you. I know exactly what that road is like and what you have in front of you, and man---I can't even begin to tell you how hard it is. It's quite literally an experience that cannot fully be explained. Breaking from the pack and going out on your own is like no other experience. You must commit to the journey. You must be willing to sacrifice and work and strive and suffer more than those who take the standard path. Just know that it will be hard, harder than you can even understand, and mentally prepare yourself. Do not take the road I took unless you are willing to pay the price.

Now that you have recognized that you don't want to be just another suit, and that you have a difficult road ahead of you, the hard part begins...and I can't really give you much guidance.

You see, everyone has their own destiny, what Paulo Coelho called a "Personal Legend" in The Alchemist, and no one can really tell you specifically what it is. That is what he affixed the "Personal" prefix; it is uniquely yours and no formula or checklist exists to reach it. If you want an instruction sheet for your life where you can check off the boxes, go back to Merryl and be a number. There is always room for one more suit.

Do you think that at any point before I put up TuckerMax.com someone could have told me that this is what I'd be doing? Fuck no. Even if I didn't call you an idiot and a kook, I would never have seen the path to get from Duke Law Student to here. You know why? That path didn't exist. I cut this path myself. I made my own place in the world.

All this being said, I won't just toss you to the wolves and wish you luck. I can't give you a checklist to find your destiny, but I can give you some advice:

-Let go. Just like you can't walk a tight rope if you are clutching the platform, you can't find your destiny if you are clinging to the safety of school, work or family. This doesn't mean that you should drop out of school, cut ties with everyone you know and be unemployed, it simply means that you cannot have both safety and achievement. Achievement requires risk, and risk abhors safety.

-Stop doing what others expect you to do. You are the only one living your life, not your parents, your teachers or your friends. They all have opinions about what is best for you, but what the fuck do they know? Their lives are just as fucked up as yours, and they probably don't even realize it or have the courage to attempt to change it. You cannot cut a path through the jungle of life to your destiny if you are busy satisfying the demands and expectations of others. Love your family and friends, but live for yourself.

-To find you destiny, learn to listen to yourself. A wise man told me when I was only 7 years old that I was going to be a great entertainer one day. I brushed it off because I wanted to be Indiana Jones. For the next 20 years I continued to run from and fight my destiny. I went to the hardest undergrad in the country and majored in a hard science (before switching to pre-law to graduate in three years), then I went to law school, then I tried to run a business. I refused to listen to myself, I ignored all the signs, even though the whole time I was writing, keeping a journal, and often obsessing over skills that would later serve me in my entertainment career but had no application to law or business. It wasn't until I was 26 that I finally stopped doing what I thought I was "supposed" to do and learned to listen to myself and do what I wanted to do, to find my destiny.

The fact is, there is something out there that you should be doing, and it isn't working as a suit at Merryl. You know this, which is why you are so frustrated with your life and why you wrote me that email. I have no idea what that thing is, but my guess is that you probably have an inkling as to what it is. Accept it. Start moving toward your destiny. You don't have to do it all at once, you don't have to drop everything, but you do need to at least start thinking about it now.

But maybe you really aren't sure. Ok, that's fine. Keep on the "prescribed" path for now, but start listening to your soul. It will eventually tell you what it is you should be doing, if you let yourself hear it. The day I knew I needed to commit myself to the entertainment business was the day that I woke up and realized that the only thing getting me out of bed was writing funny emails to my friends and reading great books. I realized that even though I'd spent my classroom time studying economics and law, I'd spent most of my free time reading and writing other things, and that I should stop fighting myself and work in the field that truly interested me.

-One last thing: Have the courage to chase your destiny when it presents the opportunity. If you follow the advice above, it will be difficult, but at some point you will have a chance to chase your destiny. It is a hard road even just getting there, but sadly, that is only the first part of the journey. You must then decide to go after what it is you want. That act--making the conscious decision to step off the beaten path and take the risk to carve your own place in the world--is possibly the hardest thing you will ever do in your life.

I can't definitively tell you how to get that courage. You either have it or you don't. I know I have what it takes; you are reading the very proof of this fact. But I don't know if I could tell you how or where I got it. I do know one thing: The courage to follow your dream has nothing to do with intelligence, race, color, creed, religion, sex or any other way to differentiate one human from another. The strength of character needed to take that risk come from deep within your soul.

I have a notion where it comes from. I think courage is the confidence of knowing that you have what it takes to accomplish your goal, the belief in the rightness of your cause, and the intense desire to get what it is you are after. I don't know though. At the end of the day, it's ultimately one of those things that you feel it or don't.

You started out asking how you can find the balls to do what you want in life. All I can do is point you in the direction you need to go, but you have to make the journey yourself. You have to decide what type of man you want to be. Do you want to be just another number...or do you want to be one of those people who lived their life on their terms, like me. There is very little in life that is a choice, except life itself. Now you have to choose.

Tucker even shares a bit of his own personal journey to finding and achieving the success he has now, here:

Originally Posted by Tucker Max

Fast forward to January of 2001. I was in my third year of law school, and on a lark I compiled all the absurd pick-up lines my friends and I invented and wrote The Definitive Book of Pick-up Lines. I had no idea how to get something published, so I just sent inquiry letters to every publisher and book agent whose address I could get. The ones that did respond treated me like an unwanted refugee; they told me that there was no market for my book or my voice, and that I should stick to law. One editor told me, and I quote, "No one cares about books about how to pick up women. Men don't read."

With many other careers in front of me, I temporarily gave up my writing career and focused on law. That didn't work out very well; not only did I hate being a lawyer, I was fired after only three weeks on the job. The story became an urban legend, except it was true.

I graduated from Duke with a JD and got a corporate job running my family's business in Boca Raton, Florida. I hated that even more than being a lawyer. In fact, I hated it so much I ended up acting out and was eventually fired. No really--my OWN FATHER FIRED ME from my family's business. No joke.

It was a turning point in my life. I was 26 years old, living in South Florida--the cultural cesspool of America--and in the past year and a half I'd failed at the two things I had spent my education preparing for: law and business. I felt adrift and rudderless. I was truly depressed and, for the first time in my life, I didn't know what to do.

As I was trying to sort through my emotions and figure out what to do with my life, I happened across a book that changed my life: Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club galvanized all the disassociated thoughts floating around my head: I didn't exist simply to consume the pointless possessions thrust on me by modern society. My meaningless job did not make me who I was; I am more than my accumulated possessions and my job. There just had to be more to life than this.

Fight Club reminded me of a time when I didn't live the life that I thought I was supposed to live, but when I lived the life I wanted to live. It reminded me of when I used to read because I enjoyed learning, not because I had to look over a purchase order. It reminded me of when I wrote because I loved expressing myself in words, not because I needed to finish a memo no one would read on a subject no one cared about. It reminded me that the meaning of my life was not about my job or my clothes or my social status, but about who I was and what I did. But most importantly, it reminded me that life happened in those fleeting moments of creation when I was writing. That act—turning my emotional life into written word—that was what got me up in the morning, and that was what truly mattered. I decided to stop being the person everyone else told me to be, and start being the person I was. I decided to stop wasting my life in jobs that I hated working for people I couldn't stand, and instead start living my life myself and for those moments when I felt alive: I decided to write full time.

With no real plan except an intense desire to get out of South Florida, I immediately sold everything I owned and moved to Chicago. I took some of my short stories to publishers and magazine editors, and just like with my first book, they laughed in my face, told me that my stuff was shit, and that there was "no audience for these crass, obscene, pseudo-frat boy ramblings." Another direct quote.

But this time, I didn't quit. I knew my writing was good, I knew there was an audience for my stuff, and I knew I could do this for a living. I knew I was right. I had staked my entire fucking life on this, I HAD to be right. I ignored the doubters--which at this point was everyone in the entire publishing industry and most of the people close to me--and kept working at my goal. The only problem with this was that even though I knew I could write, I wasn't quite sure exactly how to go about getting noticed in publishing, especially now that everyone I had approached in the publishing business told me that my stuff was crap.

I went to two of my friends from law school, PWJ and JoJo. They both told me to put my website back up. I'd had a site for a short time in law school, but had taken it down to live a "responsible" life. I reposted my website, TuckerMax.com on September 9th, 2002. I was dirt poor, making no money, living on the McDonald's Dollar Menu and dollar domestic bottles at dive bars, but I didn't care. For the first time in my life, I was living exactly the way I wanted to and not the way I thought I was supposed to. I was writing every day, going out and meeting people, getting drunk and hooking up numerous times per week, and loving every second of it. I felt truly free for the first time.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, and before I really realized what was happening, I blew up.

By December--only three months after its launch--my site was getting so much traffic I had to move it to a dedicated server, by January, MTV was filming a special about me and I was working on the site full time. Then in May 2003 Katy Johnson, aka Miss Vermont, sued me, the NY Times wrote about me, and my traffic went through the roof. Absolutely off the charts. By September 2003, only one year after I put the site up, I had been "discovered." I had a book agent and a TV agent, and numerous TV, book and movie deals offered to me. I was bound for worldwide fame. I'd followed my dream, just been myself and did what I loved, and turned it into a success. I'd won.

But a funny thing happened on the way to victory. As I reached for the carrot dangling in front of me, the stick blindsided me.

My book proposal got several offers, all of which were comically insulting. No publisher was willing to take any sort of risk on an "internet writer." They were treating me like shit because they could. Even though I had a built-in loyal audience that was larger than 95% of the writers published, they saw no reason to give me any respect. After all—what else could I do? I had to take a book deal. There was nowhere else to go, right?

Indignant and insulted, I turned all the book deals down, because I thought I still had a TV deal. 20th Century FOX bought my pitch, and I had a pilot offer from NBC, but they wanted to make my show into the same crap they always make--basically 'Friends', except with dirty words [you have to remember, this was fall of 2003, before the bottom fell out of network comedy and everyone in the entertainment business realized that multi-camera sitcoms were shit]. I told all of them no; it was my name, my art and my dream and I would only do it if it was done right. I didn't go through everything I had gone through just to sellout at the last minute. They basically laughed at my naiveté, and the TV deal died.

In the face of pressure to change my voice and style to fit the strictures of conventional media, I held the line, and for it, I was rewarded with no book deal, no TV deal; not a thing to show for my hard work, effort and integrity.

At first it really depressed me. Here I was with hundreds of thousands of people a month coming to my site and reading my stories, the pied-fucking-piper of the 16-32 year old demographic who had built a huge following with nothing but word of mouth and his own talent, whose unique voice spoke to his generation and had almost single-handedly defined a new genre, and I was treated like shit by these fucking no-talent suits in the entertainment industry who thought they knew better than me what my audience wanted. The entertainment industry treated me like I should just be happy to be there. They thought I should be appreciative that they were going to make millions off my talent and only pay me thousands from that. They thought that even though it was my ideas and writing that had drawn the millions of readers, they should mold my voice their own way. They thought I would just have to accept it because I was a powerless writer and didn't have any idea what I was doing.

Well fuck them. I was Tucker Max long before any of this shit, even before I had the site. I want it, but I don't need any of it. I would rather be poor still running my site and my life my way with my integrity and dignity intact, than rolling in money but with the Hollywood dick stuck up my ass. That's not how a man lives.

Of course, it was easy for me to make this decision because I had an option that no generation of writers preceding me has had: The Internet. Ten years ago, I would have had no choice but to take their bullshit offers and let them butcher my work, simply because there was no other way to distribute my writing. I would have to bend over and take it, and then pray that I could get big enough someday in the future to be able to dictate some of my own terms and do the art I wanted to do.

But not anymore. The internet has changed everything. Now, anyone with a computer and an internet connection can publish and distribute anything they want, and anyone else in the world can access it for virtually no cost. Random House and NBC only want my art if they can sanitize it and fuck it up? Stick it in your fucking ear, assholes--I can monetize the visitors I get and take all the money for myself.

In the summer of 2004, after being tired of getting fucked with by the mainstream entertainment industry, I decided to take my destiny into my own hands. I put up a few ads on my site, and before I knew it I was making great money, more in fact than if I had taken my original book deal. But more importantly, I was doing my art my way. No assfuck hack of a suit is giving me "notes" on my script, telling me what I need to edit out to please some corporate sponsor or to speak better to the Red States.

It was at this point I read Mario Puzo's Fools Die. I realized that I was letting my hubris get the best of me and kinda being silly by taking this personally. Fine, they were trying to fuck me in a way, but it wasn't personal and I wasn't the only person getting this treatment by the entertainment industry. In fact, the established media had been fucking artists and writers in the same way for long before I came around (obviously, I should have realized this earlier, but remember I was new to the business and far too absorbed with myself to notice anything besides my own reflection in the mirror).

Fools Die led me to several books on old Hollywood, which led me to other books on new Hollywood (notably Hollywood Interrupted by Mark Ebner and Andrew Breitbart and The Big Picture, by Edward Epstein), which led me to think about the entire concept of content delivery and re-affirmed what Rand and I figured out ten years ago: The internet was going to change everything. It could connect the consumer directly to the artist, and largely remove all the bullshit in the middle that had become the modern entertainment industry.

That post was taken from Tucker's philosophy with FesteringAss.com (now now as RudiusMedia.com). It can be found here: messageboard.tuckermax.com/showthread.php?t=8188] and, messageboard.tuckermax.com/showthread.php?t=8270

Jam it back in, in the dark.