A little while back, I heard a band that introduced me to a new and particularly tragic category of artistic badness: They were exactly good enough to suck.

What I mean is that they were just barely, slightly, asymptotically over the threshold of minimal talent, past which musicians are condemned to be judged by ordinary musical standards. This naturally meant that, by those standards, they were guaranteed to be found as wanting as is humanly possible.

Had they been infinitesimally more awful, they would have fallen into another category altogether—at worst, merely a clique of amateurs goofing around with some instruments; at best, perhaps, even achieving a sort of campy “so bad it’s good” charm. But they were not, alas, quite that bad. They were exactly good enough to really, really suck.

This category must exist in just about every human endeavor. I used to be tasked with sifting through the “slushpile” of unsolicited submissions at Reason. As you might expect, a good portion of this was utter dross. I probably saw hundreds of pieces or pitches that demonstrated only a passing acquaintance with English syntax and grammar; that defied the most elementary principles of structure; that betrayed an almost heroic indifference to what might interest the ordinary reader. But I never thought of these as bad, exactly. They were thoughts some people had felt compelled to write down, and if they were not exactly publishable, well, why would you expect them to be? The ones with the power to really make me wince were the ones that exhibited enough skill to switch on whatever editorial circuit in my brain is responsible for appraising “real” articles, but so little beyond the minimum that the circuit would promptly and spectacularly short.

I say this—appearances to the contrary, perhaps—not just by way of an extended sneer, but also in a spirit of solidarity. All of us, whenever we try anything at which we’re not naturally gifted, are condemned to pass through this unfortunate phase. We’re no longer just goofing about, subject to the comfortably lax criteria of the cheerfully hopeless—what a marvelous finger painting for a five year old! But neither are we yet (much optimism lurks in that “yet”) proficient enough to be any damn good. (People I’ve slept with are politely requested to withhold any comments that might seem apt here.) If we want to improve past a certain point, we’re forced to accept that getting better will, at least initially, make us worse.