What do you get when you cross painkillers, motorcycles and Flannery O'Connor

About a year ago, I got stuck on my couch for a week. I read the complete works of Flannery O'Connor and watched Ride with Norman Reedus. My head addled by Catholic allegory and open asphalt, I typed up a short story named "Get Along Fine."

It's an OK story, mostly valuable for the description of the highways between Denver and Albuquerque. But I hadn't the slightest idea who'd want to publish it. So I dared myself to turn it into a podcast. A year later, here it is.

The words and acting are obviously me, including Scratch's half-baked accent. All the music is me too, playing either a Fender Strat or an Akai MPK Mini. The photo is courtesy of ckirby on Unsplash.

The first episode is below. You can listen to the whole playlist on YouTube.

Flannery O'Connor only wrote one story and it could have been written yesterday

This year I read, and in some cases re-read, the complete works of Flannery O'Connor. Like a lot of artists, she only had one theme, which she hammered compulsively, tweaking it and refining it and rewriting it over the course of two novels and 31 short stories.

She had three characters. A bad guy, often a con artist and sometimes batshit crazy. An aging Southerner, settled into a strict, frequently racist code that provides a roadmap for all his or her actions. And a high-minded urban atheist, who believes the first character pitiable and the second deplorable. At the end, all three are offered a symbol of grace, reminding them they're all sinners who need God.

And I thought, "Things just don't change much."

Internet celebrity, Flannery O'Connor and MakeFive.com

One of my favorite quotes is this from Flannery O'Connor:

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

If O'Connor could see the flood of crap that we consume today, she would have enrolled us in private classes at Andalusia. And stifled us all. To death with a pillow, if necessary.

The traditional media gatekeepers are gone or leaving, victims of technology, lethargy and their own poor taste. But they withered away ostensibly attempting a great service: filtering out the bad, the amateurish and the tasteless.

One of the great myths of the adolescent is that there is a huge raft of talented filmmakers, actors and artists out there, ignored by the mainstream and forced to create genius in and for the underground. But there's not. And today all the world has access to YouTubes and MySpaces and Seesmics, content creation encouragers that have enabled a wave of celebrities whose only claim to fame is their own shamelessness.

I keep waiting for a killer critic to do for Internet celebrity what Pitchfork does for music and Josh Spear does for product design. But the deluge of wannabe celebrities is probably too great for anyone to comprehend, let alone manage.

Maybe if we all put our heads together, we can figure this thing out.

I've been playing around in MakeFive, a new online community based on lists. The site was launched by smashLAB on November 5, 2007. Its irresistible tagline is "You are what you think." And at the risk of stating the obvious, making lists at MakeFive is less time-intensive than at 43 Things.

My first list is of the five Internet celebs who actually deserve it. Join the community, vote on my choices and add your own, if you're so inclined.