There were a lot of things he wasn’t allowed to like: musicals, dancing, wine, unicorns, cocktails, the colour pink, museums, sunsets, reading. And only a few things he was: beer, sports, sex, danger, gambling, smoking, machines. Because of this, he was the type of person no one writes a story about. No artistic hobbies. No secret hopes or desires. No existential crisis. Just one of those guys whom the main character irrationally desires or envies. The Stiffler figure. The party animal with great stories to tell. Great vapid stories. For a person like this to become the centre of attention to a literary audience, something outside of his normal routine had to happen to him. Something aside from arguing with his girlfriend (with whom he had little else in common except that they both had few enough gendered interests to have little else in common), yelling at the TV screen when his local team lost a hockey game, blacking out on weekends, masturbating to strictly heterosexual pornography on the Internet, and talking about UFC and models while at his construction job. Something else had to happen. Something to shake things up. A crisis to save him from his own crisis of monotony. But nothing did. So he only gets a paragraph.
May 6, 2010
The Average Joe
About writewithlightning
write with lightning 
May 6th, 2010 at 10:11
hmm, how everyman, or not, is a character like this? he is contemptible through his mediocrity. he is neither hero nor villain, just a particle in the shapeless mass that follows either the hero or, more likely, the villain.
evil people do not scare me; i can look them in the face and tell them what they are. it’s their horde of mediocre stooges who scare me, the average twits who mark their votes for the nazis, the khmer rouge, or the pederasts in the vatican.
and consider this: john locke claims that we learn everything through experience. now, is that an admission that who are is nothing more than a ruse we repeat before others for their enjoyment?