What do you think?

That’s all I ever want to know, really.

Oliver “Shiny” Blakemore
4 min readJun 9, 2017
Jon Tyson | Unsplash

But for some reason, that seems like a hard thing to learn from you.

Which, you know, I totally get. With so many opinions I can adopt, if I like, and most of them more attractive and easier to keep than what I actually think, I totally get the allure of never saying what I think and, instead, telling people what I hear that I should think in order to be “happy,” whatever that means.

You know, like, I can see the attraction of certain health advice. Like how eating chicken wings out of a the back of a truck in the parking lot of a football game will give me a long, healthy, prosperous life. Or how ostracizing some less attractive person is a one way ticket from melancholia to godhood. I mean, those are some pretty good tricks, I think. If you ask me the secret of happiness I will probably tell you, in this order, money, power, and starch, and I will probably say that the way to get those things, in that order, is to walk over weaker people in order to achieve those things. And I will tell you that the reason I believe what I’m saying is because a guy told me so.

It happens, you know? It happens a lot. We live in a world with a lot of compelling guys telling us a lot of attractive things to believe, and in my day-to-day I’m sure that I’m more likely to repeat something…

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Oliver “Shiny” Blakemore

Writer. Storyteller. Spy runner. My novel is out on query. Some agents are interested. It's cool.