SIMPIN’ AIN’T EASY – by Cypress Butane

If You Call Someone ‘SIMP’, Chances Are Under Todays Growing Usage, It Means You Are One – Lexicography Says Usage Defines Meaning, But Your Use of ‘Functioning’ For Your Addiction to Debasing Folks and Language’s Worth Isn’t Fooling Anyone

Take down some dictation, will you, Margot?

There’s a great moment in an episode of my favorite show, Mystery Science Theater 3000, in the episode where they are riffing jokes over the old Bela Lugosi film ‘The Corpse Vanishes’. A groom tries to sneak into the room where his bride is getting dressed by the bridesmaids, ignoring the tradition that a woman is not to be seen before the wedding in her dress by the groom.

Crow, a gold plated robot made of objects found around the spaceship these enthralled-critics reside on delivers the obvious verdict on this dud:

“SIMP!”

Meaning, Simpleton. One who simply don’t get it. Unhip.

Now, the subtext? Brides are dying and their corpses are being stolen. In the end it turns out that killer corsages are being delivered to the brides by some mystery giver prior the ceremony which they don, mistakingly trusting intentions of any and all as they are in delicate moment of pursuit of connection. Or something.

I.e. the metaphor I might pursue would be some are calling over eager courtship ‘simping’ because of a belief women and romance on a whole are poisoned, enmeshed in a culture of deathly oversexed commercialized intention to thieve us out of our most potent purity.

And there is most certainly merit in that. More than certainly. One must agree that our world is full of peril for the pure, the seeker of love, the invested in some ideal view of sex and connection, of whatever bent.

But what, in this agreement, would make one a ‘simp’? The only possible definition that one could agree on, would be on disagreement of terms – as in- tactics, temperaments, touches – personal or gasp- physical.

That it is a term of judgement with no agreed criteria makes it nonsense. A blunt object, tooled for bludgeoning. Making unsubtle arguments more forceful and loud. It usurps the meaning of a word which has one, by forcing it through the inverse.

But trying to explain one should have game instead of calling their competion some fuckwit name isn’t an argument worth having.

One man’s simpin’– is another man’s gangsta shit. DEAL

We are in an age largely unmoored from traditions in a realm where social connections are evolving swiftly. Fortune favors the bold. And calling others simps, usually for what amounts to ‘trying too hard’ is not bold, it’s reductionist and cold. The world is full of things that can sink one’s heart if one does not guard it and teach it to swim, to be strong, to follow its own beat. To face the currents that life hands it with a contentious view and a hearty defiance.

Yes, the undertoad (sic) is strong today.

I will not deny it is hard, harder than usual to be, especially if young, a romantic person facing the world and these slings and arrows. What must be done?

Not, certainly, to build a negative minded culture where people are chastised specifically for what could be otherwise construed as romantic gestureds, effort, and having strong willed hearts. We need to let out a roar that defeats this death culture of commercialization of our humanity. What I call, due to the technological nature of much of culture’s vexations:

THE JOHN HENRY CONTINGENCY.

John Henry was a steel driving man!

He was the best at laying down railroad track there ever was. Till he was replaced by a machine. So they had a match, Henry vs the Machine. How did the story turn out? Does it matter?

Or does it only matter what Henry wanted, what he felt, the life of his mind, his own heart’s beat?

It is time to enact this protocol. Time to Initiate the JOHN HENRY CONTINGENCY! I do believe.