I Got Nothing

You know the great thing about Disney movies? There are so many of them, it doesn't matter if a few of them suck.

"Pocahantes?"

Wow! That one really sucks. Nothing like making a movie for kids that makes you feel guilty about being white. Not that I think white kids don't need to understand the ugly truths about American history. They do. I just don't believe it's up to Disney, Mel Gibson, and a personified raccoon to shove a big morality lesson down their throats.

And sucky as "Pocahantes" is, it's not nearly so miserably awful as "Hunchback of Notre Dame." You have to wonder about the thought process behind funding a kid's movie about a disfigured man, a super hot gypsy woman, and a sexually deviant clergyman. What exactly about that screamed "children's feature length cartoon musical" to the suits at Disney's not-so-wonderful world of executive decisions?

The great thing about what makes something suck is that it's entirely subjective. For instance, my list of all time most horrid Disney films differs greatly from My Lovely Wife's. Topping her list would be "Wall-E."

See? I don't understand that at all. "Cars" maybe, but "Wall-E?"

What gets Disney off the hook for its occasional putrescence is its prolificacy. (It's a word. Look it up.) For every sucky movie Disney made that tanked at the theater, there are four others that soared through the air like Tinkerbell.

My point is that anyone, even an uber-imaginative braintrust like Disney, can suffer dry spells as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon. (More specifically, the desert side of the Grand Canyon, where the Brady Bunch went on vacation and got locked up in a ghosttown jail because apparently that's hiliariously good fun.) Which is why I don't worry too much about these blog posts being perfect. If Disney can afford to suck a little, then so can I.

There are times when all the bloggerific ideas are locked tightly away in some secret little vault to which I do not possess the key. Now and then I look back at the increasingly long list of posts I've published and am surprised by a few I had forgotten. Then I read them and understand why I forgot them. They suck.

Same thing goes for the fiction I'm working on. Sometimes I belly up to the computer or notebook with all the enthusiasm in the world, but nothing worthy of being written presents itself. At these times, I force myself to write something, anything, just to keep up the practice of writing.

I know if I maintain my productivity, and achieve a prolificacy, I stand a good chance of sucking less than more.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler