Today I’m totally paralyzed. I woke up, checked the tracking number on my iPod, and it’s now in Kansas or Kentucky or some bumfuck nowhere place. It’s probably going to take another week at least. I went to work, got done with that, and walked over to the library to drop off Ulysses. Their Internet was down, so I couldn’t find the titles of any books that I wanted to check out, but I remembered that I wanted to read Snow Crash and something by William Gibson, so I typed to those into the library’s search database. Nothing. I wasn’t surprised. As I walked through the aisles, it amazed me to see a biography of Hillary Clinton. It seemed like every book was published in some year before 1945. I glanced at all of these great authors: Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Dante, and I’m just bored.
What do these dead people have to tell me about my life? How is any of this still relevant? All of this ridiculous musing about God makes me want to fall asleep. There is no God. There is no ultimate justice. What is the point of these novels? Partly because it’s gotten less implausible, and mostly because I have nothing better to read, I’ve been working on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein again. The writing style is just so different from modern writers. Every two seconds the characters are crying about the beauty of something and then crying with suffering or so moved with glee that they’re floating on air. I wonder if today’s prose will go down in history as being so incredibly unrealistic. But then again, what is literary realism? If I read a truly realistic novel, it would be about me sitting here for two hours blogging. Or the 18th century equivalent. Yawn.
I read the Wikipedia entry for James Joyce yesterday and absolutely lost every interest I ever had in reading that book. He adapted it from Homer’s Odyssey. At one point in the drafts, every chapter was named the same as the chapters in the Odyssey. Way to go, James Joyce. You can not only write a painfully boring novel, you can rip it off from a poet that’s been dead since the eighth century. Fucking uberyawn.
So I stalked around the library for a few minutes longer, trying to find something. I saw one novel by Philip K. Dick, but it wasn’t one of his well-known works. And I had this thought that there was no point. That all of these people were dead and would have no idea how to relate to modern society. Me and Amanda were talking online yesterday, and we couldn’t find anything to say to each other because we already knew everything about each others’ lives via blogs. What if we lived in a world where everybody’s thoughts were immediately published and all information was instantaneously available from anywhere? There would be no point in conversation. It just makes me very uncertain that we are living in such times where were blundering ahead into this brave new technological world with absolutely no reflection going on about how this is going to change people and our whole society. Maybe there are people writing about it, but I haven’t heard about them.
J.G. Ballard is losing his touch. He predicted the 90s. Bravo James, but we need some new prophets, and I don’t see them in this cultural wasteland of cut and paste philosophy. I feel like I want to write again, but I don’t know what I want my theme to be. I sort of want to write something creepy about someone who lives in Crescent City for a time and eventually all the veneer is peeled back and he realizes he’s in hell on earth. But I think that’s been done. I picture this scene where the protagonist is running from someone that’s going to beat them up or something, and he keeps knocking on doors but no one will open because they are all high on methamphetamines. Later in the book everyone he meets is high on meth. I’m picturing a character who’s a correctional officer. Maybe all of the hate and violence that they see at the prison would spill over into their real lives and they would all go crazy and try to destroy the town. But that’s all been done before too. Should I bother retelling these themes of paranoia and loneliness in society? Or are they new because technology has compounded them?
OMG!!! I got the funniest e-mail ever today. It was from Taggart, my ex from Sacramento. I guess word got out that I was moving down there, and he wants us to “correspond like civil adults.” I guess by correspond he means fuck. I get those confused myself sometimes. It’s an egregious typo. God. Who the fuck does he think I am? Even if I was living down there, I would never talk to him again. As my mother would say, “A leopard doesn’t change its spots.” I was so thrilled at it though! To think that a hot guy actually would consider being my fuck buddy! Glorious. Oh my god, I just concieved of looking through my old posts to see if I could link to a salient one about Taggart, and around 250 posts came back when I typed his name in the search box. My god. I’m glad I’m over him.
I guess I’m going retro today and listening to The Golden Age of Grotesque. It seems very fitting. From “Para-Noir:” “I fuck you because I am your whore / I fuck you because you are a whore.” I should listen to something else. This is bringing back bad memories. Some Lacquer is in order.
If I had a band, I would call it Veneer in homage to Lacquer, but nobody would make the connection. And I’m sure there’s probably twenty bands that are called that. But I would do it anyway.
It was really nice walking around Crescent City today, this lady asked me for directions to the library. And she was about a block away. I sort of felt like telling her not to bother, but she might want some romance novels or something and then she would be perfectly satisfied with the selection.
This entire post has been so that I can stop thinking about how I haven’t e-mailed Matt back about the web site. And about how I bid on this $250 computer that isn’t worth $250. I found this much better one with a 1.3GHz processor for $200. And a working screen. But I guess I could use the broken screen one for my dad’s computer. Or follow through with my plan to buy a working screen off eBay and install it myself. I have two days for someone to outbid me on the $250 one so that I can buy the $200 one. I think that if pressed, I would get both…though if I got into some sort of bidding war, I would be totally out of luck. Well, it’s something else to occupy my mind while I wait for my toys to come in the mail. I seriously need to e-mail Matt today. I think the real reason that I’m not e-mailing him is that I don’t want to do the site updates, even if he pays me. But I don’t know. What I need to do is to do the work and then ask him for payment for further services, but that would involve doing the work. And I would rather sit here and do nothing.
So I’m paralyzed. I need to email Matt. I need to tell Misty I’m not moving in with her. I need to finish that web site. And I don’t want to do anything but complain about my pathetic pseudo-intellecual dillemas.
