I don’t know what to tell you about this website.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Matt Elliott. I have, for almost a decade now, written various things online. Sometimes people even read them, though that was never the point. I have, under assorted names and handles, written things as far-reaching as fan fiction (you will never find this), video game reviews, sports-related opinion columns, WWF wrestling reports, fake parody letters, a series of well-paying articles about natural breast enlargement (more on this later), and, most prominently, 100 articles about various topics (including some fiction) called, for no reason, The Best Things.

I stopped updating my last website because I was tired of writing every week. I gave a bunch of other reasons, like being “out of ideas” and “desiring riches [as opposed to, I guess, the greater good or whatever]“, but the truth was that I had, once again, backed myself into a wall.

I back myself into walls a lot. Both literally, like the time I was trying to take a picture of a hockey team at a local arena and, while framing the shot, walked square into the boards, and figuratively, like when I find myself trapped in a never-ending cycle of doing the same thing over and over again, despite having every opportunity to change. It’s like being on a slow-moving carousel which you could, you know, easily jump off of, but for some reason, you can’t.

You’re stuck. Against a wall. On a carousel. This metaphor is strained.

For some people, this will sound completely insane. These people are the doers. They’re not the types to pussyfoot around and consider the wildly unlikely ramifications of every minute action. They go through life more assured than that. They change lanes after only checking their blind spot once. They brazenly enter conversations without attempting to anticipate the next six possible responses from the other party. They remove their USB Memory Keys without the safely remove hardware wizard. They are easy-going around fire, they didn’t need to acquire a taste for alcohol, they dated when they were 13, they have yet to fall in love, they relish the idea of parasailing, they frequently complain about things being too ‘wordy’ and, most brazenly of all, they dance,
and
love dancing,
and are dancing,
probably, right
now, as you
read this. The point is that they just do things, seemingly without consequence and without much thought, and that, really, is something I’ll never understand.

I’ve had conversations about this kind of person a couple of times with other people who are like me. Usually in a bar approaching midnight, surrounded by people at least a decade older than I am. (These are the best types of bars.) And inevitably it gets to the point where I’m forced to consider that despite being able to describe these people in the sort of way that makes them seem real, I don’t actually know anyone like this.

Now, back in high school, when I knew maybe six people, two of them under the age of 30, I could rationalize this. “I don’t know anyone!” I’d think. But now that I’ve been to university and had a social awakening and reinvention like something you might have seen in a movie once (You know, like The Graduate. Or Son in Law.), I can’t really use that excuse. Because I do know people. Sure, a lot of them are still over 30, but I know young people now! People all over the world, who do all sorts of things and work all sorts of jobs and are, actually, far more interesting than I’m making them sound. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from hanging out with these people, living with these people, loving these people and watching endless reality TV that we hate with these people, it’s that, by and large, everyone is just like me.

So that barroom truth I’m forced to confront is always that the people I describe, the doers, are in fact a myth. They’re people you see but never know. Because to know someone is to understand that they’re just as weird, confused, hopeless, hopeful and emotionally exhausted as I am. I may have my own unique set of quirks — I am fairly sure no one feels as bad as I do about asking service people in stores for help finding something — but no one (and I’ve tried to test this) is as self-assured as they might appear. Even those guys with the backwards hats and the Bud Light, making gestures like they’re humping the air, hair like Chad Kroeger, all wearing the same polo shirt with the collar up share, if you get to know them well enough, the same insecure trait: they’re terrified of their own lives.

And so am I! Paralyzed, even, sometimes.

The Carousel Comes Back

This is all a round-about way of saying that this site, which is different from my last site, exists because I wanted to fundamentally change the way I wrote on my last site but, because I’m fundamentally weird, like everyone else is (as established), I couldn’t just change the way I wrote on graphicmatt. Carousels, in my world of metaphors, where black is white and up is down and nothing is as it seems, don’t change speeds. They go and then they stop. I had a style for the old site, and as fun as I had writing in that style, I wanted to move on.

So welcome to BE Something, the result of all those words you just read, and an experiment in collaborative writing with Erin Balser, who loves baby names and little else. Over the next week I’ll explain more about what I want this site to be, and, hopefully, actually show you what I want it to be with a series of posts that are actually, you know, interesting and good.

I’m not entirely sure where this site will end up at the end of this week, nevermind the end of this month or the end of this year (similarly, I don’t know what will happen to graphicmatt, either) but I am committed to doing something with this space on the internet. I may not be a doer, but I can still do something. And, to be titular, I can still be something, too.

Matt Elliott

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