Blood on the Bus: A Prelude to a War of Words
I could be wrong in my instincts, but I highly doubt it in this instance. Benedict Monk, in a rather thoughtless and inane attempt at humorous writing, posted the following on his blog, Heir to the Hornbook(a namesake whose qualities I'll leave for another time and place), as a part of an entry entitled "To be this tired, I'd have to be blitzed," the following passage: Needless to say, I know my audience. You want me to talk about the blood that pooled at the front of the bus a few days ago? I won't. I don't pander to your violent tendencies, except to say that it's one of the few times passengers efficiently loaded via the back door.
The incident in question refers to a late night encounter with the vaunted 54C in which those desiring to board were greeted not with an open door and the prospect of entering the warm confines but with a rather disturbing scene, blood on the bus floor.

Now, anyone not totally desensitized to all the grim realities of life here in the big city, might think this is odd, disturbing, curious, gross, etc. Benedict, however, feels differently. Blood stains on a bus floor are, apparently from the passage above, beneath his talent for comment and word play. Pandering to the tendencies of the masses is beneath Benedict. What seems to be the more interesting topic in which the passage appears? Sleeping on the floor and trying to finish a paper for class. How pointless. It is truly a sad state of affairs and a real comment on the state of writing today when a truly bizarre event such as pools of blood on the floor of a bus fails to generate interest in the writer's perspective and takes second place to such mundane, trivial, boring events such as finishing a paper for class and succumbing to exhaustion.
Benedict's skills as a writer are not in question here. In fact, I like his writing a lot, and I think his writing flows in a natural manner that conveys to the reader the facts necessary and in a tone that's poetic in nature and rhythmic in it's patterns. In other words, he's a good writer. However, and as anyone who deigns it necessary to follow these pages, I have a problem with frivolity. I find most of the subjects that Benedict writes about to be less than interesting in prose form. Mundane, daily events are not interesting. They just aren't, but a plethora of people, Benedict included, find some sort of inspiration from these quasi-freakish occurrences that happen each and every day to most of the public at large. The thing is, though, no one, not even the most talented writer in the world, can make these events seem more than the sum of their parts.
My theory about this is that I believe that there are incidents that are more suited to being spoken aloud in the course of a natural conversation and aren't worthy of mentioning in a prose piece. Reading takes time, and I can't think of a larger waste of time than when I'm reading something and realize at some point, most often too late to stop, that the effort it takes to read this print isn't compensated by the rewards garnered after finishing the piece. I don't glean much from reading about the daily minutiae of life. Life's too short waste precious moments wading through writing that's borderline pretentious and without any redeeming value. I just don't care.