An Intro (of sorts) – What Is AWESOME?
I should apologize right now.
I should… but I’m not gonna.
This is about as close as you’re gonna get from me in terms of a manifesto for this blog. What you’re about to read? This blog?
Just you wait.
Flashback to January 2009, and my buddy Matt Armstrong asks me for a hand. Says he needs some new content. Says he wants me to stop flappin’ my gums about how shitty everything is and COWBOY UP. What am I complaining about? The veritable lack of AWESOME in damn near EVERYTHING these days.
He asks me, “So what’s awesome?”
So I give him this. It’s a guest post. It gets some convo started. It gets some new traffic for MountainRunner. It gets laughed at, linked to, pointed at, sloughed off. Like most one-offs on the seas of the Internetz, it gets forgotten.
But not by me.
I keep thinking, “Dude, I can’t cover EVERYTHING AWESOME in ONE GUEST POST on a public diplomacy blog! There’s gotta be more!”
Right?
RIGHT.
It’s on the tip of your tongue. It’s scratching at the back of your throat. It’s driving your top left eyelid to pulsate in iambic tetrameter. It’s the all-encompassing, all-knowing THING you feel every time you see it. Every time you hear it. Every time you taste it. Every time it touches you.
It’s AWESOME.
You KNOW it when you feel it, when you see, hear or read it. It makes your eyes blow up wide, your mouth open, some weird mouthbreather noise escape the depths of your gullet. “OMFG,” you say. “THAT’S AWESOME.”
And THAT’S what we’re gonna explore here. Together. AWESOME.
I’m not gonna rehash my original call to AWESOME from MountainRunner; you can find that here if you want to read it in full. But for the Cliffs Notes kids out there, here’s the deal:
If you are going to do something… do it AWESOME.
Doing something shitty or to a preset standard is lame. Anybody can do that. If you are not doing everything you can to achieve the absolute pinnacle level of badassness… well, that just sucks, dude. What’s the point? Just to maintain? We’ll get into that too.
It’ll all happen here. Comedy. Music. Movies. Government. Social media. Marketing. Influence. Public diplomacy. Defense contracting. Comic books. Writing. Family. Happiness. Blue Meanies. Harsh language. You name it. Nothing is forbidden because everything has its degrees of AWESOME.
Now, I got problems just like the rest of ya. It’s a hard road to slog being AWESOME all the time. We all can get a little down on our own shit, and we all need a little help from our friends. So I’m lookin’ at YOU to chime in. Call me out on wrongness… or lameness. Point me to other examples of AWESOME.
Conversate, people!
My name is Christopher Dufour, and I wanna be AWESOME.
I hope you do too.
