Should You Ever Take Advice From Anyone on The Internet?

We’ve reached the point in the Great American Story where thinking about doing things is basically like doing them.

Giving advice over the internet is easy. I have done it anonymously, under my own name, and under the guise of Grandma Jim, for some reason, in various places. Men are particularly good at giving advice over the internet, often unbidden. Somehow, we men just think we know everything. Or, even if we don’t think we know everything, we think that somehow our not-entirely-knowing something can be some kind of answer. An answer that might amuse people sitting at desks all day looking at websites.

And thankfully somehow the worst advice can sometimes be the best: the kind of advice best ignored, the handkerchief you release and let billow over the rail of the Staten Island Ferry at midnight. “Screw you! I’m gonna do it my way, Jim Behrle!” you scream over the white ferry rail. And you should. You should do it your way.

“I should have listened to Jim Behrle” is a sentence no one has, before this sentence, ever said or written or thought. I’ve never been a dad (that I am aware of) or ever held a position of any great responsibility. And I generally live a charmed, if sheltered, existence in North Jersey. I spend many hours on my back, throwing a baseball toward the light above the thing I use as a couch, which is a cot mattress and a fake leather futon cushion I found on the street and a large, red broken Ikea bookcase that holds the whole thing up.

Knuckleball after knuckleball flutters toward the light, which I sometimes hit. I use a ball some player threw me during batting practice before a Cincinnati Reds’ game on a trip I took to celebrate 6 months’ sobriety many years ago. I have signed my name all over the ball, over and over, in many different colors. It has large raised red stitches, which helps me with my various knuckleball grips. This is how I spend my days. Working in a bookstore, seeing my shrink, sometimes cooking, and throwing a ball over and over at the ceiling.

Have I written advice columns before because I think people should emulate my lifestyle, my approach to the world of things? No, that’s not why I have ever written them. I do not think that this is the only way to live. My apartment is messy. I don’t get laid very often. I don’t make much money at the bookstore. And I live in New Jersey.

What do I think of as I watch the ball flutter toward the ceiling? I think to myself, should I be writing?

Giving people advice over the internet is much better than doing it in person. If you give someone advice at work, at some point you will have to follow up with them. “Did you end up giving your dog that mohawk?” you’ll ask as you wait for your microwave burrito to finish cooking. They will shrug. No one ever does anything. They just like to consider doing things.

But we’ve reached the point in the Great American Story where thinking about doing things is basically like doing them. How often will you ruminate on whether you should leave New York or not? Ruminating on it and actually doing it are basically the same thing, except you skip the part where you wish you hadn’t moved out of New York entirely. It is all in your head, like everything really is. I am not a real person, I am just words in your head typed by a guy you will never meet saying “Sure, give your dog a mohawk. Dogs don’t care what their haircuts look like, unless it is like totally in their eyes.”

When, honestly, I have no idea what dogs want. I mean, to be petted. And pretend bacon, clearly. Dogs have tails so they know when they’re happy. Human fetuses have tails. Until we are like 8 weeks old. Some humans are born with tails. If humans didn’t cut off their tails at birth, we’d be a lot happier. At least we’d know we were happy. You’d look back, see the tail wagging and think, “Well, I must be happy.” And isn’t being happy what people want?

I do not know what people want. Often, I will think to myself, what do people want from me? As I am picking dandelions or throwing a baseball over and over. Do you really want to be happy all the time? Wouldn’t that be boring after a while. If the weather was beautiful every day, wouldn’t we completely stop giving a shit about the weather? Wouldn’t we bitch about how it never rains? I mean, yes, probably, we would do that. Humans are not built for sustained happiness. We are weirdly-self-thwarting creatures, determined to bitch about shit even when our tails are wagging.

No writer is happy, like no human is entirely happy. Dogs don’t even write, no one ever teaches them to write. Their stories would be about sniffing each other butts, probably, if they could write. I once smelt a really great butt. There was a dog in a Dave Eggers’ story, but I don’t know. He was a fast dog, I guess. But writers are miserable! Because writing is hard. And no one cares about what we write. And even when people do like what we write it’s kind of depressing and anti-climactic anyway. I mean, look at J. K. Rowling. She is the most successful writer of basically all time. Then she writes mysteries under a pseudonym. And gets caught almost immediately. And then she’s broke or something and decides to make movies about monsters or quidditch matches or whatever. Then she writes a Harry Potter play. That is coming out this summer.

And you’re like, J. K. Rowling, you’re all over the place. Can’t you just spend your days eating skittles and counting money all day? No, she is a writer. Nothing can ever be easy for her. Everyone wants more Harry Potter constantly. She must be so sick of all that shit by now. But that is all anyone will ever want from her for the rest of her life. Wouldn’t that drive you insane? What I’ve just laid out is the best-case scenario. Look at George R. R. Martin. The man is a basketcase. He can’t write fast enough and the pressure is getting to him. I would have just hired ghost writers to write for me and go back to eating skittles. But he can’t. He’s lost! And life is hard! And no one’s tails are wagging!

Also, giving people advice over the internet means you don’t have to watch as that advice totally ruins their life or anything. Like who could stand that? I picked a dandelion on the way to the bookstore the other day. The dandelion wilted on the short walk through the parking lot. I put it in a dixie cup and put it in the window near my desk. It closed up overnight, poof. No yellow flower at all, just completely shut. I brought it out to the sunny deck near our bookstore and left it out there. Then I forgot about it. This is all a way of telling you I killed that dandelion. That my actions and decisions did that weed not one lick of good. If I had not picked it, maybe it would have lived a happy sun-filled life on John F. Kennedy Blvd, on someone’s unkept lawn. Being a yellow flower in the sun must be a wonderful job when the sun is out.

This is all a way of writing that I was thinking of starting an internet advice column. Would that be a good thing? I mean, maybe. People are unsure of themselves. And I am very sure about what other people should do. And I have no idea what I should do about myself. So there we are.

I don’t bring any grand life experiences to the table of internet-advice-giving. Most of my life has been a series of failures and small victories, followed by more failures. And lots of baseball games I don’t, and won’t remember. I did used to run lots of book events, and so I’ve met and heard many authors speak about their secrets of writing. That’s the questions most people ask at book readings. They try to nail down the author about how and when they write, like what’s their secret. Do they write with a big glass of red wine at dusk, or first thing in the morning after getting a little oral sex? I’ve heard hundreds of answers to this question and they’re all essentially meaningless.

I had to stop doing author events. I just could not take one more answer to the question of “when do you write?” It doesn’t matter. Writing is an unnatural act that most of us have to be forced into committing. How many nights did I toss balls in the air when I could have been writing this? Instead of writing it at 1:45 in the morning, because I could not sleep. Is it worth having written? I don’t know. This is the internet, everything here is worth having written. Or else we wouldn’t be here.

Should you ever take advice from anyone on the internet? Yes, definitely maybe. I will give you the best advice I have that you definitely did not ask for but are probably wondering anyway. And how to possibly avoid throwing baseballs around your house. The first step to being a great writer is to stop giving a shit about what other people think of your writing. See you on the internet!

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City and works at a bookstore.