I keep everything I write because I am obsessed with myself.
Category Archives: Analysis
Dudes Love Dicks
I was talking to a fellow bartender the other day, a woman, who said she isn’t interested in male comedians because four out of five of them base their jokes on penises.
Then I looked at this story I just wrote and there’s a dream where the guy sees flies on his penis. And I’m always talking about sucking my own dick.
I guess I’m obsessed with my penis. I don’t mind, I’m just mad I didn’t notice until now.
Then yesterday I read this interview with Mary Karr, a memoirist who I need to check out. In it there was this bit:
MK: You can ask me about my relationship with David Wallace all you like; I’m not going to talk about his penis.
NYT: That’s one of the least interesting things about any man, really.
MK: If only they knew that.
Ha! Shit I had no idea. Well I guess I’ll stop bringing up my penis all the time.
And I guess I’ll stop watching porn all the time based on this bit from Mary Karr in the same interview:
I’ve also never Googled myself. It wouldn’t occur to me to do so. It’s the same reason I don’t watch pornography. It’s not that I occupy some moral high ground. I just think: Down that road lies madness.
I never thought about it, though probably obvious to enlightened persons, but porn is probably damaging to the psyche. I was just so happy to watch porn after throwing off the mantle of Christian guilt.
I guess I’ll think cut that shit out!
But I ain’t gonna stop drinkin’, no matter what Mary Karr says about it.
Is This All We Took From New York?
I went to the Brooklyn Public Library today with my wife for the second time. We looked for books on the history of New York to help her write her latest paper for school. There were some books that had won awards and some books that looked outdated. I was curious about all of the books, I wanted to have read all of them and know what the titles meant, but I didn’t want to actually read them. I mean I wanted to, if I had all the time in the world, but I wouldn’t make time to, because none of them were written in a way that resonated with me.
I finished American Gods today. Four days. I just had to know how it turned out. Not so much a page turner as just a book that really spoke to me and so I just pushed everything to the side to read it, like how I do when friends come to visit. Just wiped the desk clean, so to speak.
I had a beer on the way back from the library. A belgian trippel at a place named for a saint near Bergen Street. Yum. We are going out for burgers for dinner. And I have no money, but fuck it, I actually do have some money. I was going to pay bills with it but I’m sure this is more important. Fuck bills.
I was thinking today that I have to stop identifying myself as a waiter/server/bartender. I have to allow that shit to fade out. I don’t want to pick up the mantle of professional dealer with manic old men who write books, but at least that would be a step in the right direction.
I am an artist!
Every Winter Day Inside Alone
There’s the part of the winter day where you feel good about the day and then there’s that other part where you feel bad. How to break the cycle? The cycle goes something like this: you wake up, you feel good, especially if you can go back to sleep; you wake up again, you feel ok, if you went back to sleep you feel maybe less good, maybe lazy; you do something for the morning, you feel good, plenty of time to do something else; you hit the afternoon and you feel like god damn it there goes another day; it gets dark outside, and you melt into a morose puddle somewhere in your apartment until you decide to watch TV because fuck it, take a nap because really what am I going to do, watch fucking TV?, drink, because you deserve it, or go outside because there’s something you were actually supposed to do and you somehow managed to put on clothes; at the end of the day depending on what you did in the worse part of the day, you feel bad or drunk; you go to sleep, you feel good if only because you’re in bed again.
I actually did everything I ever wanted to do in life today, which is read and write. I wrote for three hours on that essay I recommended to you yesterday. But even so, I knew this moment would come. The dreadful afternoon, where everything sucks, I am a worthless pile of atoms, and outside the window and inside my atoms, the gray is darkening into nothing.
I will write again later, I hope, on what I learned by reading deeply through this essay, which as it turns out was not as well written as I thought. I’m not saying it wasn’t worth reading, especially for me, but it wasn’t the greatest thing I’ve read this year, and it’s only been fourteen days. So.
But I just wanted to say before I left this damnable gray box of an apartment for some damnably cold brown one room coffee shop, that the predictable ennui of a long day inside has yet to deter me from trying have a perfect day inside. I wish I could give it up, but by the end of the day, I will realize that this bad part only lasts for half of it, and I have progressed in writing in reading in ways I could not have if I had spent the morning preparing to have a better late afternoon.
Anyway, see you in a couple three hours [sic].
How to Be Optimistic About the Future
I was watching Cosmos last night (the one with Neil Degrasse Tyson).
I still haven’t made it through the first season even though my wife and I were really into it when it came out last year. I think it was last year. We would watch it at the end of the day as the episodes came out, but eventually we got too busy with the wedding. Either that or the wedding happened and then we left the country. I can’t remember which came first.
It was Episode 11, The Immortals. It dealt with how life could have began on Earth and how it could have survived a lot of cosmic collisions by escaping on rocks, circling the sun, and then crashing back into water and regenerating. Tyson also talked about the first recorded poetry and the epic of Gilgamesh. At the end, he wonders about the future of humanity.
He said that in the next forty thousand years or so, if humanity survived, we would evolve to have more of the good stuff about us and less of the bad stuff. As a species we would be both smarter and wiser. It makes me think of the beginning of the first Transformers movie when the narrator says something about the people of Earth being young and dumb. I guess I haven’t thought too much about that lately.
I was having a conversation with my good friend about how in a few generations we might be able to travel through space and do cool stuff so really the point of life was just for us as a species to stay alive long enough until we could do that. But while I was saying that I started to think that really that’s a pretty lame point of life. It’s pretty much the same as being a virus, like Hugo Weaving says in The Matrix. But at least it was something to do. And then my friend said that anyway we would never be able to do that, intergalactic space travel takes too much energy, more energy than is in the universe, or something like that. I think he was full of shit, but at the same time he was a physics major and knows about that kind of stuff. But he also hates talking with people about the big things of physics because he says people have wild ideas about the possibilities and big questions that physicists like Richard Feynamn raise, but really we have just enough reason to believe any of them as we do any other random thought so it’s really not worth talking about. Which I get on a certain level, the level being that everything is pointless so of course a conversation about something no one knows or can know is even more pointless than everything else, but at the same time I was like mother fucker what do you know about this shit? But still I was depressed that populating the cosmos was the best idea I could come up with for the point of life anyway, plus it couldn’t happen because my friend said so, so I was sad.
But last night when he was saying that we would evolve into better people if we stayed alive long enough, I thought, well shit that makes good sense. Because as I get older, I become better even though I don’t try. So if humans as a whole are like humans as individuals, even though we’re not trying very hard, we could eventually get better.
It’s like I always say, Time is our best friend and our worst enemy. Time heals all wounds. Getting anything done is effort over time. I always say all those things, which is why people don’t usually enjoy having conversations with me.
It’s easy to get depressed if you think of the current human race getting the technology to populate the cosmos because then we’d have whole planets with the words “Made You Look! Your Ad Here” written across them. However, if you think about humans a thousand years older, well they might be less obsessed with profits. It’s at least possible, which is sometimes enough.
After I thought about all that, I thought, well, what should I be doing? The obvious thing for me to do is to teach a kid how not to be a huge dick to the whole world all the time. And then I could teach the kid that it’s important to teach other people the same thing, or we’re all fucked. And then if the kid taught the same thing to the next generation of kids and so on, maybe that would have been something useful to do. But I hate children, so maybe that’s not going to work.
No I don’t really hate children I hate parents. And children are annoying most of the time because their parents are bringing them around when you are not in the mood to deal with some stupid fucking animal with no manners but that the parents want you to treat like a human. And then you can imagine the child growing up to be a huge dick all the time anyway. And their loud and I don’t like noisy things.
But no I’m not really opposed to that plan of action. Teaching kids something useful in the hope that eventually humans as a species will grow up is probably a good idea. What else though? I was just starting to think I should just write a dumb ass book already and try to make some money off of it again. Now I’m back to thinking I should do something that matters, like be a scientist or something. Well it’s hard to know what to do.
What I did think about today though is that it’s no wonder I don’t know what to do, and that most people are unhappy. It has something to do with the fact that our brains have evolved very quickly, our technology has evolved even quicker, and our bodies are still full of animal chemicals like adrenaline and stuff. Should we all evolve into Vulcans with no emotions? Maybe it would be better for everyone. But that’s not what I mean.
What I mean is that maybe I am wrong about the way I am looking at modern life.
I have been thinking of my future as going into the woods and living a self-sustaining life in New England, chopping down trees and doing things that are directly connected to surviving in cold, heartless nature. I’ve been thinking of doing this because the way that I live now is so disconnected from the true functions of a normal earthbound being (finding shelter, finding food) that it’s no wonder I can’t be happy. Maybe the truth is that my body still thinks it should be scrambling around for food and shelter, so it is not happy with me being employed and buying my food from the store and paying rent to secure shelter, but I shouldn’t be listening to my body. Maybe I should be listening to the more evolved part of my self which is my brain, which could work together with other brains to create a better future for my species, which is the highest aim of evolution.
Or is it the highest aim of evolution? Is life about providing the best future for your offspring or just about having offspring that survive? And what defines “best future.” Well, I guess all things being equal it would be fine for humans to revert to chopping their own firewood and building their own houses or whatever, basically being as sustainable as the tribes of the Americas before they were destroyed by European pathogens. That would be a “best future.” Except if you’re thinking really long term. In the real long term, Earth is only a temporary living situation. So the species will need to evolve to move around space if it’s going to survive forever. My good friend says he’s sure that no humans will be around in ten thousand years. That’s not depression, though, that’s stupidity, I think. I think anyone who thinks they know something they can’t know is being stupid. When I think there will be no one around in ten thousand years, I’m thinking that because I think there probably shouldn’t be any of us around in ten thousand years, being stupid and pointless as we are. But when he thinks that, he thinks that because he thinks he knows that. I don’t know if you can see the distinction.
But anyway, I thought while I was feeling weird at the subway station today that I should stop trusting my feelings. The body and the mind are one and the same, but feelings are just chemicals after all. Just because I feel like I am wasting my life by going to work at a restaurant, it doesn’t mean I am. Just because I feel like I should be out chopping wood by myself, doesn’t mean that that does anyone any good at all, either.
Hm, don’t trust your feelings. Don’t feel, just do. Well, I don’t know exactly what to take from these new thoughts especially since I was just about to get back into the Tao Te Ching, but if I do figure something out, you’ll be the first to know.
Some Shit I’ve Been Doing on the Edge of 2014
I’m five posts shy of my goal of 200 posts, but fuck it, pretty close. For the last ten days I’ve been thinking of posting but then I didn’t do it. I only posted three months out of this year anyway.
I am back in working mode and I haven’t written anything for days. Maybe weeks. I finished reading Sense and Sensibility and started Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. The same guy lent it to me. I also downloaded Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy so I can read it in the dark.
I am working a lot more on my book projects. Just trying to stack up some paper, you know. Fuck it. I’m going to meet this guy soon. The old guy I’ve been working for over the phone and internet is going to roll up into Brooklyn in about thirty minutes. He’s an irascible character so it should be a good time. I am not looking forward to it.
I have a lot of other shit to do today and I’ve already done a lot of shit. And today is my only day off. And I told the other restaurant I would work there a couple days a week so maybe it’s my last day off ever. Well, at least until February, and then I’m going up to Vermont for a week.
Something I learned from thinking back on my wedding is generally those times we plan for are the only things we really remember. Life goes by in a blur since we’re doing the same thing over and over again but the days that we made a point of doing something different, especially if we had to think about it for weeks beforehand, or longer, are the days that define a life. I’ve thought about it before in a different, more depressing way. Like how Steinbeck describes it in Out of Eden, something about life going by without any signposts to hang a memory on. Well, those planned days are the signposts, and that’s not really all that bad. So instead of avoiding the boring, tedious work of constructing signposts in hope that a really cool one will just pop up a couple of times a week, I’m spending a lot of time planning this trip.
And I’m spending a lot of time not caring about what happens in the meantime. I’m trying to think long term, like yearly. Kind of like I was saying about throwing 2015 away. If you take your life in year chunks instead of day chunks, it’s like if you waste a year, no big deal. And forget about wasting a day, that’s pretty much a given for every day. As long as you do something really cool for a couple days out of a year maybe every ten years, well you pretty much had a good life.
And read books in the meantime. And get drunk at least a little bit a lot of the time.
Also I’m not eating a lot, but I think it’s making me fatter. I don’t care though, because it’s winter time and it’s cold as a bitch out here.
How Accurately Can You Represent Yourself to Yourself
I always thought I could write in a different style. I thought my voice was a construct and I could play with it, that I could vary the length of my sentences, that I could change the cadence at will, that I could use a different regional dialect, that I could write in a circle or in a square; I always thought that I had what singers call range. Now I think I’ve been writing in this voice for too long and it’s all I can do. It’s pretty good, I think, but I don’t like that it’s all I can do. It’s like what someone said (I thought it was Machiavelli but I can’t find it): being nice doesn’t count if you don’t have the strength to be mean, he said being nice without the strength to be mean was just indolence.
Anyway it turns out I can’t write a long sentence that doesn’t degenerate into a run-on. I mean I can but I really have to think about how to do it and that bothers me. They say practice makes perfect but other people say perfect practice makes perfect. I guess just because you’ve been doing something a while, if you do it without thinking about it and consciously trying to improve, well then you’re probably not going to get much better.
Well, it feels good to do the writing exercises, even though they point out my deficiencies. I don’t know what it is, but I have this weird sense that I’m the best writer that ever lived, while also thinking that I am probably not even supposed to be a writer. I also hate when someone else writes something good. Like deep down hate it. But it’s just not justified. It’s like when House tells that story about the janitor in the hospital who was an untouchable, but when the doctors there had problems they couldn’t figure out they would go to him and he would tell them the answer and even though he was treated like a piece of shit they still had to listen to him in the end because he was right and that was all that mattered. If I was a genius at something then I could be a real asshole like House and hate everyone and I could still have a positive impact on the world. But if I just hate people and think I’m the best for no reason, that just makes me even more of an idiot.
But I also think that I exaggerate my emotions to myself. I’ll be trying to figure out myself and be completely honest with myself but then I’ll say some outlandish shit that I think really cuts the bullshit and gets to my shadowy essence. But then I think about it and I look at my life and I just don’t think that I can actually feel that way. I think maybe I want to feel that way or something.
I am really trying to figure myself out, but it’s another slippery slope, to use a cliche. The reason it’s a treacherous path is that I spend a lot of time thinking about myself, because I think the more I know about myself, the better artist I’ll be, but then what happens is I get into that black hole i was talking about where my ego just spirals out of control and sucks in my entire life. So maybe I should stop thinking about myself and just think about other shit, and I won’t be able to help but have my own opinion on that shit that I think about. Or then again maybe I will be able to help it. I am good at not having an opinion. I am at least good at not expressing an opinion. Sometimes I don’t talk because I’m too lazy to move my mouth. I’m too lazy to be mean, that’s for sure. Hm, but that’s a philosophical question, whether it’s a virtue to be nice, even if you can’t help it. I mean some people would say yes, what are they called? Determinists? Or something like that. BF Skinner would say what matters is the result. You’re nice so you’re virtuous. Would he say that? I don’t know. But someone would say that while the counter argument would be that without agency your niceness is meaningless. Nothing is right unless you do it for the right reason. But I guess if you saved someone’s life they wouldn’t care if you did it because you were having a life saving contest with the guys next door or if you were doing it to get into heaven or if you did it because it was the right thing to do.
I did everything on my to do list today except make limeade, which I guess I’m going to get up and do now. Finishing the list wasn’t easy actually and took up most of my day. Going grocery shopping, going to the gym in the snow, and finishing that work for that old man was not at all relaxing. God damned Word started acting the fuck up with the page numbers and phantom tabs or some shit, I was about to fucking bite my fingers off one at a time, with a small pause in between to maximize the amount of pain my brain could register, just to escape that shit. Fucking maddening shit.
But I got it all done, and then I was ready for wife to come home, sort of, I mean not really, but I was about to get up off of this couch where I fell asleep on and off while trying to fix that stupid ass Word document, I was about to get up and make that limeade since she was getting all nonplussed about these two dollar bag of limes sitting around for two weeks before she got home but then she texted me and asked if she could have a drink with her friend. Well, shit, I didn’t even have a drink yet. I’m about to put some vodka in this limeade.
But that’s neither here nor there. I learned today that I have got to work on my technique. I mean, I still can’t seem to write a cohesive story, but at least I can learn how to write a different kind of sentence.
I also thought today that fuck it man, I’m just going to waste 2015. I’m not even going to stress about that shit. I’m going to pretend like I’m immortal and just fucking trash next year. I don’t care if I take three shits a day in 2015 and average 16 hours of sleep a day, fuck it. I’ll do something in 2016 if I’m still alive, is the way I see it. I always get these high expectations for myself, you know? Like I’m going to figure some shit out this year! Well, hell, fuck that shit. I plan on not figuring out a god damn thing. If I do figure some shit out I’m going to watch Grey’s Anatomy until I forget it. I’m not even going to watch a show I like in 2015, because I’ll be making progress toward finishing that shit. No progress allowed. I’m going to start at the end of Grey’s Anatomy and watch it all out of order in an alcoholic stupor so deep I’ll probably cut myself accidently with a steak knife while eating a raw cashew and I’ll bleed out, my blood will be so thin and I won’t even notice. That’s 2015. Hell yeah. That way, when 2016 rolls around, mother fuckers will be like, man, how are we going to top 2015? How are we going to do it big this year? And I’ll say, bitch, I’m…fuck man I’m dead. I died in 2015 of not getting out of bed to eat and also bleeding to death.
I Forgot to Name This Post
It feels strange to type on a laptop keyboard now, I’ve been writing from my iPhone for the past few days. I started blogging from my phone out of necessity, and now I think it’s become almost equal to or greater than blogging from the computer. I think it makes me think more about what I’m going to write, without slowing me down as much as writing with pen and paper.
I’ve been thinking a lot about writing lately. I want more people to look at my blog and like my stuff and come back to read, so I don’t want to flood the blog with posts, but then the only thing that seems to raise the number of people who look at the blog is to write more posts. And then I always want to write, but writing in a word processor isn’t enough for me anymore. I want someone to read every god damn thing that comes out of my head.
But I’ve thought it before and I’ll stop thinking it soon and come up with it again in a couple of months: Fuck it, maybe I can get away with publishing every stupid thing I write.
Wife is back to school so that means lots of time at her computer which means lots of unsupervised time for me. I have to get working on my projects for those old guys who want to publish books, but honestly I wish I could give that shit up. I’ve felt very free these past two days, since I told them that I would get back to him in a few days once my friend left.
But I can’t give them up because they may be my key to getting out of waiting tables. If I got two more clients like them I could just stay home and work on their projects. But maybe it would be just as bad as waiting tables.
I started listening to The Self Publishing Podcast today and it was really interesting to hear those guys talk about writing for money. They are very prolific. I feel like I can’t write stories. I feel like if someone were to give me a well thought out story, I could write the scenes, but maybe I couldn’t. Fuck if I know.
Oh that’s another thing, I’ve been making a conscious effort those last few posts to censor my language because I started thinking maybe I could get freshly pressed. It started off motivated by that, and then I found that I could come up with more clear and creative way of expressing myself than cursing. But sometimes that’s just too fucking much to think about.
Hunter Thompson curses a lot in his writing but he doesn’t overdo it, in my opinion. So I think I will try to do that. But then, fuck, I’m always trying to do what other writers would do. I don’t know if I will ever figure it out. But I do know I’m too young and inexperienced to be discouraged about that, even if I’m too old and have seen too much dumb shit to believe anything good about anything.
But yeah, the blog is blowing up! Mostly because I’m engaging with the community like in the early days of last year when I reached 400 views in one month. It’s not much relative to a lot of blogs, but I haven’t been able to get anywhere near that since. I think I posted an average of three times a day that whole month.
Ah I’ve been trying to avoid writing this kind of post and stick to the interesting stuff but I guess I am too excited about writing so much. Writing begets more writing, said someone famous. And then the positive reinforcement that comes when the notifications keep popping up on my phone that someone looked at my blog or commented or liked.
That’s why I was thinking, I forget what I was reading but they were saying if you want to create something new you’ll have to do something you haven’t heard of anyone doing before, which sounds obvious, but it made me think fuck it, if I write enough posts that are interesting to me, maybe I can find enough fans to quit my job and stay home chopping down trees and drinking white lightning and blogging from my phone.
Ha, I’m not really finished writing but I just want to publish this so people can read it while I’m writing the next thing. Fucking ridiculous. I don’t know, maybe I’m a god damn genius.
Is Everyone Miserable?
A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are sometimes severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh vapor which corrects the over-harsh contours of pure thought, fills in gaps here and there, binds together and rounds off the angles of the ideas. But too much dreaming sinks and drowns. Woe to the brain-worker who allows himself to fall entirely from thought into revery! He thinks that he can re-ascend with equal ease, and he tells himself that, after all, it is the same thing. Error!
Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness. To replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
I have been reading Les Miserables and I am a little over halfway through now. It is the first book that I downloaded on my iPhone back at the beginning of August. It is 9,000 iPhone pages long.
I think I have been confusing thought and revery for a long time. I never really want to think about anything because thinking is working and I strive to avoid working.
Today I want to create a post with substance. Something that is actually useful, enlightening, or at the very least interesting.
My underlying life goal has always been financial independence. At times I have wanted exorbitant amounts of money and a enough material possessions to embarrass a shah, at other times I have wanted only enough to not be forced to do anything against my will (e.g. go to work). No matter what form it’s taken, it’s been there all along, even as far back as my earliest memories.
At the same time, I’ve always written. I was always told I was a good writer. I won contests and I enjoyed writing. I tried to write many books throughout elementary school. I always wrote more than the required amount. The first time I tried to write a book was when we were assigned to write a little story about a picture. I turned it into a novel length project about a man who travels to every country. Of course I never finished or even got close.
Currently I am in the midst of one of the best financial seasons of my life. I am earning decent money and I have nothing major to save up for (e.g. wedding, honeymoon, move). If I stay on this track, by this time next year I’ll be in the highest cotton I have ever seen.
I guess I am trying to nail down why I am not dancing with happiness all the time. I am trying to put into words a conflict between the good things in my life and the bad feeling in my head.
I read these articles once in a while about self published authors who make a lot of money and I always think, I could do that. And then I don’t do it and that makes me question whether I even care about being a writer. And then when I get lazy about even thinking, about writing anything that’s not right on the top of my head, I really question whether I like writing at all, or if I am just trying to use what people have told me I do well to accomplish my overarching life goal of financial independence.
The Hugo quote at the start of this article put this internal conflict in focus for me today. I fancy myself a thinker, but I’m really more of a dreamer, a day dreamer. I like staring out of windows. I could stare out a window for hours and hours, without thinking a god damn thing. Today Wife asked me what I was thinking while I stared out the window at all the humanity passing below us and I said I was thinking about over the counter generic drugs, and I really was. I usually say ‘nothing’ to avoid looking weird and/or boring her, but I was feeling more specific.
I remember watching the documentary Happy People. It seemed to me that the main Russian guy was living an honest life. He was working to support himself. He had no one to answer to but the elements. When I go to work as a waiter, I bow to everyone. Managers, coworkers, customers, the chef…it seems like everyone is my boss. I always think there must be a way to do the job honestly, with dignity and pride. I think there must be a way, but I don’t know what it is. I remember this guy I used to work with, he was always happy and energetic. He had huge muscles and a Mustang convertible and I never saw him take anybody’s shit. He seemed like he worked an honest job. I always wondered how he did. I’m good at my job and I take pride in it but people give me shit constantly. I’m always getting talked down to by everyone, it seems. I feel, without justification for the most part, that I am at the mercy of fools. Even people I respect, I feel like a bitch because of the way we interact. I feel like I’m being walked all over, like I’m letting myself be walked all over. Maybe it’s just my personality. Maybe I’ll never do an honest day’s work.
I remember all I wanted to do was chop down a tree with another tree, go to sleep inside a moose, wake up, and there is nothing. I have this fixation with chopping down trees. With being alone with a job to do and no measure of how well you did it besides whether or not you are alive the next day. And that thing about going to sleep inside a moose has to do with that documentary, Happy People, where they are working it’s so cold that you might have to cut a moose open and sleep inside for warmth. No one does it in the movie but I expect that it happens.
Wife is always asking me what do I want to do with my life and I usually make some reference to chopping down trees. I really like trees, by the way, I don’t know why I want to chop them down. I guess that’s the epitome of honest work for me. And for some reason I’m obsessed with honest work.
I guess it has little to do with work. I guess i hate my own personality. Hate that I’m so submissive. It’s definitely the path of least resistance, just doing whatever anyone else wants, and a lot of people certainly do like me, and I like that. But I guess at the end of the day when I’m sitting in bed thinking about my life I am unhappy with it because I am unhappy with the way I am living it.
I really like House’s personality. He likes confrontation and hates social niceties. He’s intelligent and he does meaningful work and no one tells him what to do. Everyone knows he’s an asshole and he doesn’t mind. He’s miserable I guess. He’s also not real. I really like Roger from Mad Men, too. He’s rich and old enough not to give too much of a fuck. He’s miserable, but not as miserable as House. He has sex and gets drunk and writes silly books about his life for no reason. And he’s witty and charming. I guess everyone worth knowing is miserable.
I like that part in Annie Hall when Woody Allen asks this couple on the street how they make it work and the girl says, “I have no ideas or thoughts really and I’m very shallow.” And the guy says, “And I’m exactly the same.” And that’s how I always think of people that are happy, but when I saw it in the movie I realized that that’s really not true for anybody. No one would honestly describe themselves that way, because we are all so complicated, we all contain a multitude of worlds, as Neil Gaiman says. I would say I have shallow qualities, but I wouldn’t honestly say I am a shallow person. I have always believed that shallow people exist, that some people walk around with one thing on their minds, that some people just want to sell you a car, or just want to make “that’s what she said” jokes, or just want to have the loudest laugh in the restaurant, but when I saw that scene with those people in Annie Hall for some reason it just clicked that no one is really like that. I used to know this beautiful Russian girl who never said anything that interested me, but she was so beautiful I just wanted to watch her say things, and I thought with a face like that there was no need to ever have anything to say, so why should she develop a personality? She, I thought, was shallow for sure, through no fault of her own. She went to parties and she talked to dull people and she did some modeling and she talked about her cat and I was sure she had not a whole lot going on upstairs. But I think inside her head she was probably just as interesting as anyone else. She must’ve been through a lot to come to the United States from Sakhalin Island and learn a new language and all of that. I suppose.
I guess everyone is miserable, really.
Rachmaninoff
I started listening to Rachmaninoff today because I was watching this movie called Grand Piano on the flight home from England the other day and Elijah Wood said something about Rachmaninoff and I thought I’d better go home and listen to that shit sometime. I’ve listened to Rachmaninoff before, don’t get me wrong, ho ho, shit, yes, of course.
Anyway. I’m sitting here listening to Rachmaninoff and trying to think about my life. A life with a blog that does best when I talk about Smurfs. God damn Smurfs always smurfin up my stats. I’m sleepy as hell. I’d go to sleep, but my wife is at work and coming home soon and she is sleepy, too, so…solidarity.
Yes well. I was going to write, and then I drank a glass of bourbon and suddenly it didn’t seem like a good idea. A good idea seemed like sitting in a chair with bright lights on so I wouldn’t fall asleep listening to Rachmaninoff. And then I was going to write on paper and that was good for a minute until I realized I had no god damn desk to write on, and I was using my dresser but only the corner of it because the rest of it was taken up by Rachmaninoff.
I think it’s time to face the fact that I really am bored. That’s probably why I am sleepy and why I can’t wake up. Fucking bored. I never think I’m bored because there’s always something that I want to do, and it’s pretty much always the opposite of what I am doing. Like Milo in Phantom Tollbooth.
Shit. I think the problem is I expect to be happy. Some old Hannah Arendt shit going on around here. That reminds me, one of the biggest referrers to my blog is the search term “Hannah Arendt Porn”. That’s some weird shit around my way. Hoo damn. Who’d want to see Hannah Arendt get smurfed anyway.
Yeah but I am on the verge of recapturing financial stability, but what the hell is it for anyway? I got to fucking do something. I got to aspire to something or some shit. Fuck. I never thought I’d say it but I’d better get some goals and shit. Being happy with what you have…shit just doesn’t work around here. Unless you’re happy to have alcohol, because that works fine. Only problem is you can’t stay drunk all the time and keep your job. Shit I know about that. Oh did I tell you I got fired? Shit, can’t remember. That was last year. That’s why I am only now regaining financial stability. I got fired as a result of being black out drunk at work.
But that shits for another day. Fuck. What the fuck are we going to do around here? Got to cut some of this shit out. Got to accomplish some shit once in a while. Got to go to bed tired. No! Fuck, why do I always make it about going to bed. Got to go to the grave tired I might as well say, shit. All I really do give a fuck about is sleeping I guess. Yeah because that’s what I thought for a long time I was like fuck it, I guess life is all about working hard so you can get good sleep.
What I should do is work when I work and play when I play and sleep when I sleep and hopefully drink the whole time.
Maybe I should believe in God again. I was reading that belief in God or religion in general is probably and evolutionary advantage. Like if not believing in God and shit leads us to destroy ourselves with viruses and atomic bombs or whatever the fuck, if anyone’s left afterwards they will probably band together over some religious superstitious shit and that will help them to build a successful society free of space wasting nihilists like me.
Anyone's Ghost 