Damnit, English!

According to statistics, it is very likely that you have uploaded pictures to your Facebook account from various events–or, if not you, then one or many of your friends–and had a hard time categorizing some of these photos. It is also very likely that you put the photos that cannot be categorized as “Italy 2004″ and “Summer 2008″ and so forth into a photo album entitled “Random” (or some variant). Really?

When you have a collection of things that have nothing to do with each other, they are not random; they are simply unrelated. Your album is a catchall; it is a disparate grouping of similar items (photos!) that have no other logical home. But I have an idea: use a random word generator to come up with the name of your photo album. I set it to “uncommon” and it gave me “Neurotransmitter.” If nothing else, please change your “Random” album to “Neurotransmitter.”

But honestly. The term is “non-sequitur.” This is not an uncommon term in the English language.

And here’s another thing! Jokes are not random!

As someone who has made jokes before and who has relied on the non-sequitur as a comedic device, let me tell you this: every “random” joke you hear was agonized over by self-loathing writers who desperately just want you to think they’re funny. Specifically, I’d like to address the late Mitch Hedburg and The Family Guy. These are two comedic vehicles who/that do not follow traditional story-telling techniques. They use (to varying–BUT NOT RANDOM–levels of success) jokes that are not tied to a plot.

Mitch Hedberg used a comedic style known as the one-liner; he would say one funny sentence and move on to the next. The Family Guy uses straight-up non-sequiturs,* cutting away from the plot to drag us through what is generously called a joke.

Furthermore, when a person, minding his own damn business on the street and then is blown up by a bomb, he is not random; he is simply unfortunate. An explosion cannot have a random victim; for that to happen, the explosion would have to happen and then INSTANTLY every person in the world (the universe, actually) would have to be assigned a number. Then the explosion would have to consult a random number generator to discover who its victim would be. If it it were to be truly random, the explosion would have to determine the number of victims also using the random number generator.

No, the person on the street was not random. As I said, he was unfortunate. The person who placed the bomb intended to kill (or maim, or startle) the people in the immediate area around the bomb. That was intentional. There was a measurable amount of thought that went into its placement (and its construction, and whether or not to use it). Maybe it was not understood and it was very likely not predictable, but it was on purpose.

And you know what? When you say your Facebook photos are random, I pay the number generator people to make your number come up for explosion duty each time.

*The Family Guy leans on non-sequiturs so much, in fact, that South Park suggested dimwitted manatees nosed balls into slots to compose all of The Family Guy’s the jokes. This suggestion has yet to be unproven.

Please note: I am writing this blog post because people who say “Just sayin’” are passive-aggressive jack-holes. And I am not just saying that! I really mean it. Jack-holes.

This addendum is pointlessly idiotic for at least two reasons. First, it is unnecessary to know that you are just saying, because you just said. You would never say, “Got my coffee. Just drinkin’.” Say your thing and then close your mouth; there is no need to explain what you are just doin’.

Second, it is always a lie. Let’s use an innocuous phrase as an example.

I love waffles. Just sayin’.

Are you truly just saying? Do you want that phrase to float out there without further discussion, agreement, or even acknowledgment of any kind?

I submit that, when anyone ever says anything, they are saying it for a reason. This reason may be to strike a waffle-based friendship or military alliance, it may be to alert a person to an undesired behavior (such as stop breaking my vintage porcelain custard cups five years ago, Kyle’s mom), or it may be to simply request a delicious meatloaf sandwich. When the phrase is more pointed, such as, “Landlords are assholes,” adding “just sayin’” does not convince anyone that you are not talking about your landlord and what he very recently did.

All these are instances of saying with intent. If you can think of another thing to say, that is also an instance of saying with intent. Everyone assumes that when you say something, regardless of pointless extra words like “just sayin’,” there is some intent in there.

By “just sayin’” things, you go from being a relatively direct, respectable human being to being an illiterate animal jack-hole in need of a neck punch. But, maybe I’ve got my causality backwards and “just sayin’” is a helpful indicator to those around you to commence the neck punching.