No subject is terrible if the story is true and if the prose is clean and honest

“You can’t prove a negative.”

Some guy said that. Plato? Jesus? Einstein?

Whoever it was, I’ve got to believe it, whatever it means.

Is the title of this post a negative? It’s got a “no” right at the start. Sounds negative to me.

But hang on. “You can’t prove a negative.” That’s got a “can’t” and a “negative” in it. So you can’t prove that either. QED, as my old Economics teacher would say. What a nut that guy was. He got hit by a car in the student parking lot, but he was OK. That could have been a terrible subject if he’d been killed or something.

Do you ever think that some of these wiseguys who dream up stuff like “No subject is terrible” are just sitting around bullshitting us? Go have a drink in a bar around Bunker Hill in L.A., the financial district, and the bullshit just piles up. These guys. “In a pig’s eye,” Mickey Spillane liked to say.

Hey, I don’t have to prove anything. Name me one terrible subject where the story is true and the prose (writing, that means) is clean and honest, and don’t name my wife haha.

I’m thinking of about ten terrible subjects right now, but they’re not clean, if you know what I mean. You keep them clean, you’ll come up with a million boring subjects, but that don’t make them terrible. You might have a terrible time reading them but that’s your problem, moron. I’ll give you an example. You’re sitting in church and the reverend is going on and on, you think you’re going to lose your f**king mind. So you pull the program out of the hymnal holder in the bench in front of you and you start to read the announcements on the back of it. These things are worse reading than the side of a cereal box but the deal is, you’re so f**king bored that the terribleness of the program somehow helps cancel out the terribleness of the sermon. Get it? It’s the silver lining in the cloud.

Let’s go right to the source of terrible: Hitler. You’ll read or hear that the first person to mention Hitler in an argument loses. Wrong. Think of something terrible that Hitler might have done. He kicks his dog. He’s doing it with Eva Braun and he gets off and leaves her unsatisfied. Something like that. Then you write about it, using some big words like “kudgel” or “rectified” to make it prose. How terrible is that? The Bible’s got Judas and the soldiers who crucified Our Lord a la Mel Gibson. That’s terrible and it’s in the Holy Scriptures. What with all the Jews and Muslims around these days, I should also provide examples from the Torah and the Koran, but my Hebrew and Arabic are non-existent. I do know a kid studying for his Bar Mitzvah, but he’s too busy with that to help me, even if I throw a couple of shekels his way.