"Towards the end of the book, Otto and Sophie, the central couple, go to stay in their hiliday home. Sophie opens the door to the house, and is immediately reminded of a friend, an artist who used to visit them there; she thinks about him for a page or so. The reason she's thinking about him is that she's staring at something he loved, a vinegar bottle shaped like a bunch of grapes. The reason she's staring at the bottle is because it's in pieces. And the reason it's in pieces is because someone has broken in and trashed the place, a fact we only discover when Sophie has snapped out of her reverie. At this point, I realized with some regret that not only could I never write a literary novel, but I couldn't be a character in a literary novel. I can only imagine myself, or any character I created, saying, 'Shit! Some bastard has trashed the house!' No rumination about artist friends--just a lot of cursing, and maybe some empty threats of violence."
-Nick Hornby, "Stuff I've Been Reading" The Believer Oct 2003

So there's a number of things to mention before the end of the new year and the beginning of the newer one.

Don't beleive the hype I found Saddam weeks ago.

Against all odds, my car made it to 200,000 miles. That's aproximately halfway to the moon.

This is supposed to be a picture of me in the car being really happy that it made it to 200k, but it was dark.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to drive back to New York to get an overdue DVD out of Ben's car.

Going to Brooklyn, be back tomorrow.

For various reasons, I have always admired and respected Jay Z, Bill Watterson, and Jerry Seinfeld. These are people who have a disorder quite opposite from my own. These are people who know to get out before they fade out.

1) Since third grade I have maintained that the best love-song ever is "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You" by Elvis. It stands my test of time because I have never allowed my love for the song to become wrapped up in actually pretending to love someone. When listening, I never think of sappy shit, of dancing with girls, of driving in their cars. Somewhere there's a vague memory of arguing over the relevence of Elvis's potential xenophobia with some girl, but I can't remember her now.

2) After I watch the OC tonight and even after I finish my James Joyce paper, I'm going to have to write about

a) my excellent weekend getaway to Bard.
b) the Olde English show, which took place during my visit
c) the sudden, overwhelming feeling I've had since last thursday morning that I now live a normal, complacent existence, wherein in I am, on occassion, happy, likeable, and friendly.K

3) There are a few things I probably won't talk about

a) for example, how I feel like I'm completely over Amanda, not only in feelings of personal attachment, but as in I don't feel hurt, depressed, alone, hopeless, incapable, etc.
b) or how she lent me her car so I could go to Bard, I didn't even tell my roommates that.
c) or how there's great gossip on me right now, which involves me sleeping with a very likeable woman and, according to others, blurted out a large secret in the heat of the dormroom that led to the breakup of another couple. People I barely know have heard this from people I don't know at all and asked me about it. I've never been so happy not to have slept with a beautiful girl.
d) or how I have managed--inadvertently and unironically--to make acquaintances into better friends via friendster which I think is lame.

1) My heart goes out to the entire crew of Olde English, most of whom are no doubt awake right now editting video. I'm in the video art lab right now, waiting for my goddam project to render. I don't know how to get in touch with him to ask permission or anything, but I sampled one of Jesse's Placebo King songs for my video. Is that cool?

2) Bored, I just scrolled through my archives. I have no idea who this guy is, but apparently it's me posting from last summer at the beach house. Also, I am so glad that I'm no longer this guy either, I don't really have reason to walk around moping all the time. When shit first started to find the fan, I really wanted to stop pretending that nothing was wrong and really work something out for once. But that's no fun for anyone.

3) I wrote the best fucking story today. My first original, non-novel story since last summer. Yesterday I hated it, then I went back today and love it. Sometimes I walked around today and started smiling, grinning for no apparent reason.

4) There's an excellent Kenyon rumor circulating about me right now, involving me sleeping with a very attractice woman. It somehow ties into a completely separate couple breaking up. I've heard it from people I barely know, who heard it from people I definately don't know. The story is that the attractive girl heard gossip from the guy she was sleeping with (me!) and told someone else--it was about some guy cheating on some girl--and it got back to the girl. Frankly, I think people just tell the sex part to make the story interesting. The same thing happened to me in Junior High, before I hit puberty, and I was just altogether flattered that people beleived I had functional genitals.

On the way to my cooking class every day freshman year of high school, I knew that my day would improve, inevitably, as I passed the principals office. This was the point ever day where I walked by Meagan Hertenshteiner. She was in my youth group, an organization which I stayed in until senior year, almost entirely for the girls. She was a gorgeous specimen of a senior. Long blonde curly hair. And everyday, because we both loved Jesus then, she would walk by me, talking with her other cool senior friends, and we would pass. Everyday, I never spoke, I mouthed the words through my big crooked-toothed smile, Hi Meagan. And she would do the same. Hi Brendan. With her big white smile, which would stick to me through lunch and most of the way home.

Self-centered People of the World

New Game:

Today I was in a friends apartment. She and I are new friends so we have alot of fresh background on one another. Her roommate walked in and since she and I are friends now it makes sense that her roommate and I become friends as well. We started talking and she mentioned, as most at my fancy pants private school do, that she was shocked that I was from Connecticut. She asked me about my parents and then said, Wait, let's see if I can guess.

I'm guessing they're in education. Either they teach in a high school or they are both professors somewhere. English? Yeah, I'm guessing English, maybe something in the sciences or history. Teachers, or maybe they're in education in some fashion. Or if not they are involved in some kind of way, maybe not in the actual school system. But I'm getting a definate learning feeling.

As a recovering dumbfuck, the concept of someone else reading intelligence from me is astounding and wonderful. I asked her to try again--even though she had pretty much mapped out my mother's career and my father's extracurriculars from my childhood (he worked at an org that brought kids from Harlem to the suburb where Ben and I grew up)--and see what else she could find.

No, I can't seem to get out of education. Maybe they have jobs that aren't in teaching but they end up doing alot of it there anyway.

When I was younger, I explained, my mother was a cult leader, or more of a faciliator: she was a Christian Science Practitioner. And my dad worked for the state...and then my mom started teaching at a private high school.

This game is both superficial and pretend-deep, which I love because I am as well. She already told me that her mother is an Endocrinologist at Johns Hopkins, where her father is an Anesthesiologist.

So I said, Your parents both have very high caliber Gore-Tex jackets and they are real outdoorsy/sporty. You probably spent alot of your childhood camping and hiking. Your family mows their own lawn, and that was your job as a teenager and you felt really tought about it. They live in the suburbs because they like the city, but don't like to live there. You also ate natural peanutbutter, the kind with the oil in it.

Her parents, it turns out, in addition to all of the above being correct, are white-water kayakers, and they go on extreme vactions where they go windsurfing in Hawaii (where she was born). Every Thanksgiving they have an organic turkey which makes terrible gravy and does not have enough fat and juice to baste with.

Now, of course the both of us were just making up vague bullshit that would apply to most anyone at this aforementioned fancy school. But man, that was fun.

The manuscript, it occurred to me, has been deemed a final, and yet I just discovered today these bits from the notebook that I pretend is for working on the novel when I am away from a computer.

"She sounds liek someone you'd like on the outside, but she never seems to abandon small talk. You mention that you like an appliance because it would be easy to --"Because it can just, like, swivel." And the intensity of agreement makes it seem like she just gets. But then she leaves after five hours of this and we haven't advanced at all."

"Scott Hampshire spend the rest of his senior year walking around school with his hands jammed into his pockets, finger-flipping through filty scraps of paper. On one he woudl write down Denver, then cross it out and write Colorado Springs. On another he would write both and draw an arrow that changed direction."

"Early on we grew concerned of what kind of person lived inside of us. We tested it. Will I be a policeman? a farmer? Am I a good kisser? Can I knot a cherry stem?"

"One time--actually it happened more than once, but one time in particular--she kissed him back."

"She was an intensely organized woman. Her outfits daily had been ordained to impress. each day she looked to her future and filled in a portion of a college application. When seh did her homework she began with first period French and timed her final math problem to coincide with her lunchbreak, at which time she went to dinner. She fell asleep only after she pulled the next hanger from her closet and selected the appropriate shoes and socks. And when she realized that at her present rate of developement she would not need the same boyfriend when she moved to school in another year, she got rid of him, me."

"Hampshire would write these long poems abour girls. Only when he read the poems to me they weren't about girls, they were about the difficulty in choosing between two equally enchanting ice cream flavors or rock climbs."

"The Plaza scanned like a social studies textbook, a sidebar on the American way of life. When at last I grew tired of Pizza, I decided between Indian and Chinese. I delivered for them both more than once. Eating, I'd watch the window for eight-thirty when the woman at the nail place (Vietnames) locked the door. And my boos and I would begin to discuss her likelihood of marriage. 'She has like three keeds.' 'I like kids.'"

When my car wasn't where I parked it when I came out of work, I hope for the best, no I prayed, I prayed that someone stole it. After graduation I'm trying to move to Chicago and I know damn well that my $600 toyota is worth more to the insurance company than it is to me right now. Just to be safe, though, I walked up the street in case I mis-parked.

Me: Hi, um, I don't know exactly whom to talk to about this, but, well when I went into work tonight I parked my car and it isn't there anymore.

Police Officer on The Phone: Blue toyota? Rusted rear?

shit.

Me: Yes, actually, that's...Do you have my car?

POOTP No, actually...well, it's hard to explain on the phone but your car was towed.

Me: For two parking tickets?

POOTP Nah, (laughing in background among officers) well.. the thing is. Your car was in an accident?

Me: Someone hit my parked car?

POOTP The way I heard it, your parked car hit another car.

My fucking e-brake didn't hold and my car rolled through an intersection, cracking the front end of a Jeep--the occupants of which have my full sympathy, as I can't imagine what they did when they went to exchange insurance with a car that did not have a driver. By the time I arrived at the station, it became quite apparent that I was something of an office-joke, which was fine until..

POOTP (in person)Ok, now we'll set you up with a release form right now, I'll call the tow truck company and they'll release your car tonight and you can...huh...ok, forget all of that. Did you know your license is suspended?

Labels: Chicago

So the thing about iTunes is that not only do I know how often I listen to particular songs, what time of night I played which song, that kind of thing--which is handy because, sometimes I drink--but I can also type in a keyword in the search box and everything by that particular band or genre or album will come up.

Last night I apparently went to bed in a state, because when I woke up the search list keyword was "Lone." Meaning that I fell asleep to:

"Lonely Side of Town" The Aislers Set

"Polar Opposites" Modest Mouse (The Lonesome Crowded West album)

"District Sleeps Alone Tonight" Postal Service

"I Think We're Alone Now" Tiffany

"The Lonely Shepherd" from the Kill Bill Soundtrack.

All I have to say is that I'm glad I don't have Ben's music collection. God knows how many Counting Crows and Elliot Smith songs he's got that would fit the search terms.

As a life-long fake, I applaud the authors of The Literary Terms Glossary, who will no doubt provide me with the obfuscation necessary to make my paper seem more intelligent.

1) God Bless Buy Now Pay Later. For merely attending classes at a fancy college, MBNA floated me a loan of $1000, interest-free for six months. This is, you should understand, the ruin of the lower-middle class. The next day Kyle heard about the free money they were giving away at the apple store and decided he could do with an iPod as well. He asked for a thousand so that he could get an iBook instead and just work on his music collection (he has, literally, 2000 contemporary CDs). They gave him two grand, so he bought both. John came back the next day and got the same loan, but only bought the iPod. We all hung out last night, but there were two iBooks going, and we just copied music files like freshmen all night. I have more music than I know what to do with already, and I haven't even copied my G4.

2) Each day that I spent at the Apple Store, was a day when I was low on battery. I stood there, charging mine at the docks, awaiting credit checks. By day three, the morons at the desk were already directing inquiries to me. Is this worth it? I mean, am I ever going to need more than ten gigabytes of music? You know what you should talk to him. He's a DJ. So why is it so much better than just making CDs? I plugged it into a set of speakers, cued up "Black or White" and told her that there are very few reasons for which I would cart around the CD version of Michael Jackson's Dangerous.

3) I'm about three hours away from meeting Harold Bloom. If at the age of fifteen, when I first read Harold Bloom's Major Literary Characters volume on Huck Finn, you were to come and tell me that in five years, I would own sweaters and pants that were of my waist size, that I would write things down and that people would read them without grading them, that I would know the difference between chardonay and merlot, and be in a business where it became necessary that my hand be shaken by that of the series editor, I would have vandalized your mailbox.

4) iTrip. The coolest thing yet, and I promise this will be my last iPod post. It plugs into the headphone jack and broadcasts a very low-power radio frequency. Down the hall, my new toy sits on the kitchen counter, but it's playing in here two because I have the radio going. My brother and I drove somewhere yesterday, and I DJ'd both stereos. I like having absolute power. Everytime I leave somewhere I consider whether it will be necessary to hear, say, Hot Hot Heat before I return home, and if so, should it be before or after Blind Melon?

5) Area Hipster Over-Explaining Trip to the Mall. So there's a store in the other mall I went to this weekend (once, not thrice) that my brother noted as existing quite conspicuously in California, a place he visited last year. Now, as a member of my own generation I live entirely in the future and the past: everything I buy comes off line or from the salvation army. The morons at my school in Ohio are really into faux-vintage clothes. You know the kind. Aeropostale shirts with the printing intentionally crackly, jeans with ass-bleach. Then there's this store Hollister, who has a science behind their clothes. I don't know what's real anymore. They've somehow managed to make a blend of t-shirt that makes it feel broken in, thin; and they sell pants that are more thoroughly worn than I could make them in a year. Jay picked up a green mesh hat that looked sporty on him, and I couldn't explain to him that kids at my school would buy a hat that said Lawn Boys Landscaping like that, but that it was kind of a joke, the joke is that they're not really in the landscaping business, like yourself. But, of course, then I went in argument circles, right around the time Julie picked out a shirt for me from the women's section, which I then had to try on.

6) New Rules. While playing the popular card-themed drinking game the other night, my brother, Jay, kept drawing the seven, which meant he could make up a new rule. a) before you take a drink, you have to say "Dick drive this car, not pussy." Which Julie countered with b) before you put your can down, you have to say "I like cock."