Three Rare Views Of The Great Dictator

So--who would've predicted that holding down a full-time job teaching little tiny children, tending to a loving girlfriend, and writing fiction every morning would leave me so little time to blog about facts, real and imagined?

Nevermind. I know that I have been an awful curator of this bloglet, and I will heartily try to add more scribbles soon. I promise. All I need is more coffee. And about forty-five minutes more to every single day.

But! I've come to you today to tell you something important! I want your money! No seriously. But you get words in return!

I write a lot. Mostly fiction. I think I'm good enough to actually merit a real paper and binding book, but what with the moribund economy and some predictable eccentricities re: my book's actual genre, I remain unpublished. No publisher nor agent wants to take a risk on me.

So tonight I tossed caution to the wind and decided to make an eBook.

AND YOU CAN BUY IT! From Smashwords.

The book is called Three Rare Views of the Great Dictator. It's about a dictator of an imaginary country. It's more fun than it sounds.

Leave a comment. Like the book on Facebook. And read it! Enjoy it on your ereaders! Tell your friends! Write a review! Even tiny acts of recognition can give my manuscript the little boost that it needs.

Thanks for indulging me.

What Makes A Compulsive Song Compulsive?

Right now I am listening to Okkervil River's Calling And Not Calling My Ex from their latest album, the Stage Names. (The embedded YouTube vid above is, in fact, a live recording of the song.) I have been listening to this song a lot. And by a lot I mean maybe three, four, five times a day, whenever I find a spare moment.

Now it doesn't take a Master's in psychology to figure out the etiology of this compulsion. I have been thinking a lot about an ex of my own. But we might find some interest in the details. What first drew me to the song was the line "I'm feeling pretty stupid now for ever having said goodbye." Which is exactly how I feel when I'm feeling, well, however it is that I feel. The sympathy I felt at that line made me stop, rewind the song, and start to listen again. Now, one way of explaining great art says that great art expresses what we otherwise find inexpressible. That great art alone can express these feelings because those feelings are too refined to be explained by our own poor powers of expression. But the emotions I find reflected in the song remain unexpressed by me, not because they are too ineffable or complicated, but because they are too cliched, too mawkish. I miss you. I never wish I said goodbye to you. The beauty comes from a simple sentiment, expressed simply, but a sentiment that if I actually said it would encourage my friends wonder whether I had turned emo on them. (Maybe, perhaps, I have.)

This has led me to think about obsessional songs. My housemate is currently listening over and over again to a verse by the British hip-hop legend Jehst (his verse starts at 1.10). In my sophomore year of college I listened to Mirah's song Mt St Helens every single morning when I woke up, much to the chagrin of my roomate, who at first hated the song, then grew to despise it, silently, while still in bed, trying to sleep, every day. (The song's first lines, "From the morning when I rise from my bed / to the evening when I lay my head in slumber" outright encouraged obsession--indeed, the song was compulsive because it was about compulsion. I blame you, Mirah, for mornings of moody music-listening, and for the discomfort you caused my roomate.)

These songs, I think, are just proxy obsessions: in my case, I am trying to find some way to channel my care for girls who, for whatever reason, are far away from me. In my housemate's case, he listens to Jehst ten times in a row because he is obsessed with the sheer skillful exuberance of the English language, with hip-hop, with speech.

Which is a little healthier, perhaps.

I don't know if what I'm talking about here is the already much talked-about earworm, but I suspect there is some difference. The earworm comes into your head unbidden. These songs, you invite them in.

I had first planned these paragraphs as an introduction to an open thread, and so will conclude:

TL;DR: What songs are you obsessed with, and why?

Nostalgia

Right now I'm living in Canberra, where I went to high school. I left six or seven years ago. At the bars I crane my head around, looking for ghosts of people who knew me in high school, or who I used to know, and I often find them. Someone came up to me in the supermarket who used to buy my zines. People ask me when I cut off my dreadlocks (about eight years ago).

One of the questions people ask me is whether it's strange to be back, since so much has changed. The city center of Canberra, which is really the social heart of the city, and the only place that mattered to me as a kid, has changed dramatically. A mall has grown up around the edges of it, where once there were big thirsty parking-lots, and embraced the open square of Garema Place with a stone-face curtain of shops and movie theaters. That has changed, certainly. But the strange thing is more how everything has stayed the same. There still sits the same sleepy Vietnamese restaurant you never saw anyone eat in, that you were sure was about to go out of business, with the same faded plastic sign, the same sun-faded menu. The same streets and trees and the same faces. The same feeling of gentleness.

But for me this place is haunted. And each place has for me a memory. I remember driving by this empty lot nearing to the Braddon Club, heading up towards my home just a couple weeks ago. It was just gone autumn and the gutters were beginning to brim with leaves. And I remembered, so immediate that it hurt, walking down that very street, going home, in the cusp of autumn, with a beloved ex-girlfriend, just as we were beginning to court each other. The memory was so close, it was surprising that it was seven or eight years old. The fact that she wasn't next to me, that I couldn't call her, that our relationship had grown older, more complicated, and adult, just struck me for that brief moment as impossible--how could she not be waiting just outside of my vision, about to take my hand? how could it have changed. And yet I looked around and in the car were strangers, absolute strangers. (I had hitched a ride home with some acquaintances.) She wasn't there. Once I made it home I touched that place with my mind again, hoping to find her, but could taste only a dim memory, half-cold and unappetizing. For the twentieth of thirtieth time that day, I wished to go back in time, and wished at the very same moment to be right exactly where I was.

Boring Stories

You know when you're hanging out with one of those profoundly lonely people and they start telling you a story, only it's about this ridiculously inane thing because they actually have no stories since they're so lonely? Like they start telling you about how they met a man once, right, at a bar, and he we really drunk. And then you're sitting there, waiting for the story-like information, the novelty to hit, but it never hits--that's it?

The worst part about being lonely is that you have the nagging suspicion that when a person spends time with you they will judge you to be just about as miserable as you feel. Like with teen-age self-hatred, the sad part is that this sentiment is, more often than not, justified.

My Financial Plan

Well, US 'Mericans, it's been a bad couple of weeks. DFW's dead, the stock market has officially come unloosed from any tethers that once held it to the Beachhead Of Empirical Evidence causing stock prices to do a fairly good visual impression of my emotional maturity level at a high falootin' party (unpredictable huge rises and falls, with a severe downward trend), and added on top of that people don't seem to want to buy books, which makes my dream of eating with the money people paid me for my books seem unrealistic, so there's little left to do these days but wait for the upcoming season of 30 Rock.

Given these circumstances, US 'Mericans, I give you my Brendan Mackie-Brand Financial Plan. If John McCain wins the election, that's it, I'm short selling the US. You heard me right. Naked short selling, too.

I'll put my short order in naked. Take that, disappointing 2008!

David Foster Wallace Dead

As far as public figures go, this death feels personal to an embarrassing extent. Usually I am somewhat callous towards death, especially about the death of people who one does not actually know personally. But it's not just insensitivity to the public lamentations around Heath Ledger and Princes Di--barring it befalling close friends and family members, death fails to move me. Throw a friend in my lap, inconsolable that her sister's best friend died, and I'll look at them with the condescending incomprehension fitting the observation of forgotten and ecstatic religious rites of some minor deity of the Roman pantheon. But then I read that this author has died, David Foster Wallace--who I have never met and who I have had only the most tangential personal relationship with--I can't do anything but fall to my bed.

Enough of this personal stuff. Well, one more thing. In my senior year of college when I was worrying whether or not I should try to "make it as a writer" I wrote David Foster Wallace with a story of mine. I got a postcard back a couple months later, and he said that my style was "clear and unpretentious" (I can remember that) and he wished me luck in a way that I interpreted as meaning that he saw some promise in me. My number two most recurring fantasy about my novel (number one is having ex-girlfriends and -crushes call me and tell me how my they like me) is that I would get it published and sent it off to DFW and he'd read it and appreciate it and we could become friends.

Of course that's not going to happen.

But that brief brush with the man himself is not enough to warrant my feeling upset by his death. Even taking into account the place that DFW's writing held in my own personal story, his death is not enough to make me fall on my bed and not want to get up and, at a Korean Thanksgiving I was attending, invited by the Tae Bo teacher I have a ridiculous crush on, his death should not make me nearly sob over the tiggim that "My favorite author has just killed himself"--a sentence which elicited nothing but bemused glances from my dining companions, English- and non-English-speaking alike.

The thing that makes Wallace's death so poignant is that it shouldn't of happened. First, we all wanted more. Wallace's was the kind of writing that was perfectly compulsive. The loss of his voice, of the chance of another novel, that's baffling to me.

But there's more, and here's where we might have to get a bit more personal again. Wallace seemed to have struggled with the demons that come with being a smart, sensitive person in the world. And he'd seemed to really conquer them. An aside that will make sense further in this paragraph: You know how you can tell the difference between someone who gets Wallace and someone who doesn't? Someone who doesn't get him will talk about his verbal acuity (or, pretentiousness) those footnotes, that flair. Someone who gets him will talk about his observational acuity. How he seemed to be able to frankly talk about the dark corners of life with such off-putting, shocking accuracy. Like he just peered into your secret, crazy thoughts, described them just right, and told you what to do about it. And so he peered into those crazy thoughts, understood them, and didn't like what he saw.

Is it a cliche to say that the choice of our lives is whether to live or whether to off ourselves? It's something I've thought about. Does the periodic bed-bound wordless sadness that sometimes strikes me--is it worth sitting through to get to the other bits? To get to those times that rank with eating chocolate cake or hearing that your friend gets promoted or sitting at Korean Thanksgiving and having the Tae Bo instructor who may or may not want to date you hold your hand. Does the banal difficulty of life merit the pleasures? Now, sometimes I haven't dared think about that reckoning. But most times I think, pretty solidly, that the pleasures by far outweigh the indignities.

But Wallace, who I respect, who I understand, who I thought got this stuff better than most people out there--he thought otherwise. He thought that life was just too painful to keep going.

And so Wallace's suicide makes me afraid!

I'm not angry at him. I'm not going to throw around any pablum about how it's grossly selfish to kill yourself or anything like that and I'm not going to try to call him crazy for doing what he did. Because if you can't understand why he'd do it, then you're not trying hard enough. And even though those things are true, that suicide is selfish and never the right answer, just saying that doesn't make sense of his death, it doesn't give any sort of comfort.

The tough part is thinking that with all his sensitivity and intelligence, this was his answer. Not another book, no more courses teaching students, not even an easy life reading somewhere eating cake. A rope around his neck. That was his answer. And it's that answer which hurts. Like if you hiked up a huge mountain to meet an enlightened master and asked him what you should do with your life and he turned his eyes towards you and slowly, proudly, asked you what brand shoes you wore.

Oh my love it's a funny little thing.

Photo by Flickr user Andrew Ciscel

Mornings like this one, I wake up with a sense of inevitable dread. I’m afraid that all of my hopes will float by me unfulfilled, and then, what will happen to me? Will I curl up into a little ball? Will I become one of those bitter old men who walk the streets with loneliness like lead weights? And I lay in the warmth of my sheets, and think of how my day’s going to go once I cast off the duvet and throw on clothes, and from there I think of the next day month and week, and there’s something meaningless to it all, something flat and without pay-off. I'd rather just lay in bed for another fifteen minutes and sink into the shallow-oblivion of half sleep.

And I’m not suffering from some universal existential angst here. I’m not doubting that there’s any meaning to be had from life. What I’m doubting is that there’s any meaning left for me.

At the same time as I worry this, I also think: I’m being so clichéd, every other twenty-three year old with a touch of ambition feels as hopeless as I do. It will pass, or I'll get used to it, or I'll wake up tomorrow and bam everything will be okay.

Maybe that's worse, though. That everyone feels this way.

*

I’m living in a strange city. I don’t know which bars to go to, I don't know which cafes to go to - and when I do go somewhere, I'm alone - and shy. So I read a lot. I've been watching far too much of the HBO Original Series The Wire. And don’t get me wrong – I’ve met a lot of very nice people here. But there’s something missing in the day-to-day concourse of my life. My great friends – those people who know me well enough for me to be wholly open with them, who probably like me enough to read this blog on a semi-regular basis – they’re all far away from me. I hear their voices on the phone, I send them e-mails. But after a while, those long-distance calls make my present loneliness just seem a bit starker. I can remember a time when I knew everyone, when I could feel popular and successful, where I was a senior in a small college and I knew what to do.

So I feel caught adrift on something. Placeless.

And where do I go from here? My ambition leads me somewhere. But where? I know I want to write. But there’s a whole underground economy of wannabe writers, garnishing their egos with short stories and blog posts, who have just as much ambition and just as much talent as I do. I'd like to be able to sell some Alternative Weekly my squid facts for one-hundred dollars a pop. But the things I find interesting seem to bore other people. I feel foreign to a big bulk ot people. And there are plenty of people who have found themselves friendless in a big city. There are plenty of people who wake up and get scared that the next warm summer day they step out into they'll be twenty-four and not be allowed to have fun.

You’d hope that your dread, your angst, your deepest fears, weren’t so goddamned normal that they were terribly clichéd. I wish I could be feeling something horribly shocking and new. I want groundbreaking angst.

But at the same time as I dismiss this, it's there, and it's real, and it's hard to shake it. I wake up and don't have joy, only hunger. I work and what I do is desperate - like a person at the beach trying to scratch their name in the sand quickly before the next wave comes to wash it all away.

I want to run away to a new life. One where I can go into a cafe and everyone says hi and wants to talk about books. One where I can go read my short stories out loud at open mic nights. One where I can call my friends - and see them, in flesh, in real life - and talk with them in silly voices. And the hard part is that the life I imagine seems about as possible as me making friends with Mark Twain; which I want to do, by the way.

Growing Up

Before I had my first kiss, before I got drunk at my first party, before I’d ever made a meal from scratch or paid a bill or got a haircut I liked; when I was an awkward young boy who mostly just thought about the eruptions of pimples on his face and fostered a guilty suspicion that somehow I was different from everyone else, that I was weird, and I believed that this unspeakable weirdness irrevocably quarantined me from peers – back when I was twelve or thirteen and was slowly becoming me: I listened to Leonard Cohen and read Milan Kundera, artists who I only realize now were my initiation into the mysteries of adult life. I would memorize their stories of doomed love affairs and baffle myself at their philosophies. In childhood I had been able to parcel out the world into neat packages. There were the good guys and the bad guys, and the stories were simple, whole, and sweet. It would be underestimating Cohen and Kundera’s influence on me to say that it was from them that I realized how compromised and complicated the world really was; they did so much more, they introduced me to the visceral sort of human struggle I would spend the next ten years or so trying to come to terms with. In their stories people hurt each other not because they were evil, but because that’s what people did. Life hurt. And I was stunned by that realization.

I had only started to get the first aches of crushes: daydreaming about taking girls I’d barely spoken with on dates and kissing them and having sex (this fantasy all the more passionate for how unclear sex actually was to me) and I could already see that something was growing in me that I couldn’t contain or satisfy. I couldn’t stop thinking about girls. And I could get any girls. That middle ground of sexual frustration was, to me, an uncharted span on the map of life. I had read nothing about it, seen no movies about it, everyone on TV looked so assured and witty when they talked about love. I must be different, broken, wrong.

And then I started listening to Leonard Cohen. Cohen knew where it was at. Just look at these two stanzas from the song Take This Longing:

Your body like a searchlight
my poverty revealed,
I would like to try your charity
until you cry, "Now you must try my greed."
And everything depends upon
how near you sleep to me

Just take this longing from my tongue
all the lonely things my hands have done.
Let me see your beauty broken down
like you would do for one your love.

These words meant nothing to me at the time, but I could intimate that they were important. There was a clue to my frustration in the puzzle of Cohen’s love affairs. I knew that when I could understand them and feel a connection to them, then I would have somehow broken out of my childhood, although I couldn’t express it like this at the time – I just, to be fair, pretended to know what Cohen was on about, and left it at that. So I listened to the album over and over until I had memorized every line, every image. I can sing along to the whole thing, even today.

And underneath all this emotional longing, there lurked beneath Cohen the figure of the messianic prophet. That there was, beneath the texture of loss and love, a deeper love, a religiosity that as a purely secular young whelp I could only indulge in by not admitting what I was doing, by singing along, but not listening to the words that I sang.

Milan Kundera brought me into the same world of sex and mysticism, but he spoke in a learned lilt that I recognized immediately as a style, as cool. His stories were chock full of that same heady and opaque burble of sex and infidelity; but he also built his stories around people philosophizing, trying to crack the veneer of life to find some meaningful core. His characters, for all their emotional backstabbing, were not just petty players in an afternoon soap opera. I mean, they were that – but they also moved around a world of ideas. And while I was shocked by the ideas themselves, I was more shocked by the idea that you could think vigorously about how to live your life. That you could have ideas. I knew then that I would unlock that door to adulthood and the frustration, the confusion, and the compromise would be illuminated by something richer, something I could not have before expected: art.

Maybe a year or two after I first discovered Cohen and Kundera, after buying more albums and more books, I started writing myself. And looking back at my early attempts at fiction and poetry, while of course I feel the requisite embarrassment at everything you’re meant to be embarrassed about: the clumsy technique, the self-importance, the mawkish melodrama; I am more struck by how back when I somehow decided that I wanted to writ, I was speaking with a voice that I had cadged from Kundera and Cohen. In some ways, those early attempts at stories outshine a lot of the work that I did when, dizzied by drugs and adolescence, I fell in love with my own sonorous voice; or even worse – the stuff that I wrote in College that tried to tackle the Big Ideas which turned out as bad as you could expect. Those attempts at fiction failed because their intentions were impure. I wanted to write them to show how good a writer I was, to show how much intelligence I could bash against my emotional problems. My early work – and the work of Cohen and Kundera who inspired it – seem to me something purer, inspired by the love of the story, by the love of art.

I’m thinking about this now because a couple of weeks ago I stumbled on The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the library and picked it up. A week after that I was trolling through a friend’s music and picked up the first Leonard Cohen album I ever had. So there I was, here I am, reunited with the works that started it all. And it feels odd to look over my shoulder and see me ten years ago listening to the same music, reading the same books, and to feel a continuity, and a growth.

In A Nutshell, The Modern World

So here it is, folks, the high point of our Western Civilization, the apex of human achievement, when we Americans walk up to the metaphysical bank teller to cash our collective check of freedom we get this, and nothing more and nothing less:

I am sitting in the Palm Beach Airport, listening to Feist on my lovely new computer, using the free wifi to check up on the Top Chef wikipedia website. I am chatting with my friends on GChat, about to haul my slightly tanned Brendan-body into an airplane. This, my loyal readers, this is true freedom. All that I need now is a hotdog with bacon bits sprinkled on it. And you know what, I could get one, if I wanted.

You see, I've been camping out in my grandmother's condo for the past couple days, getting fat on mediocre restaurant food, watching cable TV and failing to check my e-mail. A week without e-mail! It's like a week, I dunno, without breathing, or without carbonated beverages! And now that I'm again plunged into the sea of internet connectivity, I am amazed by how simple and yet how essential this confusion of information has become to my daily life.

But you know that already. What's really interesting is that dark province that I ventured into over the last week, the one where we can't find the latest YouTube video of, well, some high cultural achievement, nor can we send our friends messages about how awesome the new Bourne movie will be. In this far-away suburb of the American experience, there is no GMail, there are no blogs, there's just cable TV. So. Let's do a quick recap of what I learned on my weeklong break in Florida:

1) I like the show Top Chef far more than I really should. The basic premise is that it's a reality show, with chefs. And the last episode was so emotional, damn. This chef called Joey got eliminated and it wasn't really his fault, not exactly. But when he found out he started bawling, his face red, these big fat true tears streaming down his cheeks and I just choked up there with him, because he was talking about how everybody said that he could never do anything and here he was, on Top Chef - and of course, he didn't deserve to be eliminated! not at all! Sara so should have been tossed right out on here lazy-bad-cheffing tchuckus. But there is no justice, especially not on Basic Cable.

2) I also like cartoons. Still. Now and forever.

3) And naps.

But now I'm back! So keep on looking out for the posts.

Sophistication / Alienation

(Image from unasthetic, found on digg.)

So, to get the basic outline of my mood, add up these two pieces of media: I've been reading George Saunders' new book, In Persuasion Nation, and listening to some Joanna Newsom.

And let's just illustrate the mood: I was walking through the supermarket last night, and all the products lined up looked like little soldiers, and I kept on thinking that there was something horrible wrong and empty about a supermarket at night. Maybe something horribly wrong when you were alone, friendless, and poor - like I was - trying to find solace in food, in consumption, in buying. There was a hint that the supermarket, or whatever grim force had organized it, was actually responsible for my feeling lonely. And thus I imagined a horrible conspiracy mustered against me and against every other sensitive person: to somehow rob their souls of this bright essential thing, to feed our loneliness and despair so that we would buy more, only because when we bought more, we needed to work more. And so work itself became this grim fuel for an engine grand and sinister. This vision! it came to me suddenly! as if the curtain hiding it from my sight was just ripped away! And America was no longer America anymore, but one huge strip mall, the roads clogged arteries leading to depression and loneliness, the houses no longer comfortable, but cages, our diseased heart beating only so we could lurch further into - into what? Some inexpressible doom. And me! How little I seemed next to it! And I have the pride and conceit to think that my little sadness can break it.

Now, the other side of this feeling, which may be particularly modern, is that at the same time as I was drawing this rather apocalyptic vision of capitalism I knew that I was just in a bad mood, that this discontent was somehow contingent and temporary. Which didn't make the feeling any better. It was like Don Quixote saw his windmills, wanted with all his heart to fight them, but also knew, knew with the better force of his reason, that they were windmills after all, and that he was a faker, for all his bravery.

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself. My discontent is actually built on some pretty solid ground, I think. It's obvious, frankly, that our society is sick. And the precise source of that sickness may be a mystery, but it is fair to say that our materialistic tendencies are exploited in the extreme, while the spiritual and artistic fruits of our lives are left to rot.

The problem a young sophisticate faces when he turns and faces his culture with disgust is this: Do you turn away from the world, just because it seems for a moment wrong? That world is filled with plenty of people, people who may need help, and turning away from them in favor of Joanna Newsom albums and masturbation just seems a little bit solipsistic. But on the other hand, isn't it just pure ego to think that I, a wet-liberal sophisticate, just because I have some refined taste and political pretensions, actually have a duty to change the world? That those other people need my help? Because they don't have as good taste as me.

Beneath that, I whine to myself. I want someone - preferably the girl I'm interested in in a romantic way - to come and fix me. But, sad for me and sad for every single male sophisticate from the Song of Songs to the Counting Crows - the girl has her own life. And then, the cycle continues: I cannot even feel this selfish need wholeheartedly, I know it will pass, I know it is selfish, I know it is fake.

This wider cycle continues on. A cycle of alienation, disgust, and separation. And yet what is one to do?

Now, normally I really like supermarkets. I find there to be such a joy in looking at the fields of broad bright color of the food, and to know that you can have it, eat it - have you ever stopped to think the sheer bounty that you can find at your local supermarket? Foods of every sort, chocolate, ice creams, pizzas, peaches anything you want! Normally I can control myself from feeling alienated. I can look at everything pretty judiciously and gently. But what makes the floodgates of my ego fall down, and lead to this - to mopey sadness? To this mixture of pride and alienation? To this tangle of despair and ego? Because whatever it is, I think that more of us feel this confused feeling - only it's hard to name, hard to express.

And so this is how we register our discontent. This is how we rebel. The rebellion of an ingrown toenail.

Modern Nostalgia

So, I woke up this morning from fruitless dreams and turned to my computer, the modern's version of the morning newspaper. I was drawn over the initial cup of coffee to Facebook because I had a mysterious friend request. And I sat there, sipping coffee, staring into this person's face, trying to rack my memory for where our paths might have crossed.

The name sounded familiar. But I just couldn't connect name and face to anything that might have happened to me. And then, in a flash of understanding, in one of those moments in which all the elements of a problem arrange themselves and stop looking like a problem at all, I realized it. Facebook says it best: "You went to high school with this person."

Now, to understand how strange this is to me, maybe you need to know a little bit of my history. I moved around a lot - I spent the first chunk of education in Oregon, then had some middle school in Chicago, and split my high-schooling between Oxford, England and Canberra, Australia. I have never kept in good touch with my old friends. I think of them sometimes, but for the most part I recollect only a mass of faceless people and a feeling that I cannot name. And I know that feeling and those people used to mean the world to me. And now... they could, if I remembered just a little less harder, be nothing.

But this Facebook picture is like a small tear in a fabric that's been covering all these memories of high school - and out of the tear peeks a glint of light, of understanding. I page through the faces of her friends... and about one in ten are people whose names I barely remember - but who I begin to remember, people who are not exactly strangers, but who nonetheless I just do not know. Each little picture is a person. I think: would they remember me? were they my friend? my enemy? what? And the picture remains silent. But with each face, the little tear in the fabric that's been covering my memories grows a bit bigger.

But the bedrock of memory beneath the fabric is never completely revealed. All I get are little glimpses of it. Those glimpses grow bigger as I think more: I begin to be able to remember old friends' names, maybe a flash of a gesture, a voice; but in the end, that forgetful fabric recovers these bursts of understanding, and I am left staring at a lineup of strangers once again.

But why do I even want to remember high school? High school sucked. I sucked in high school. I don't want to go back to high school - mostly, in high school, I thought about how much I hated everything and everyone and wanted to leave. So why, this morning, looking at the faces of people who make me remember that suffering, am I feeling like I have just solved a puzzle about myself?

This nostalgia is a way of communing with my past, of going back to the disused altar of my memory and worshiping again the dead gods whose names I barely remember and can hardly pronounce. It is a solipsistic worship - I worship a past who no one else remembers, with prayers no one else will intone. And then end result: a couple new friends on my Facebook profile, and the glimmer of a feeling that I might - if I tried hard enough - look back at the past and understand the changes that passed over me, make worthwhile all of the dim memories. Maybe I will send an e-mail to an old friend and figure out where they are, and what they're doing. Who knows, maybe, sometime in life - we'll have a coffee together.

But not yet. I click 'Add to friend' - a small benediction.

And now it's time for... the thoughts of an ENGLISH MAJOR

Ahh the public library - the chosen hang-out for the homeless and freelance writers. I took a nice chair in a well-lit corner, pulled up an ottoman (they have ottomans at the Boulder Public Library, I shit you not) and started to read a bunch of the wonderful magazines and newspapers I'd never gotten a real good chance to connect with, back when I had an actual productive source of employment and didn't just have a whole span of nothing to do in the middle of the day.

I flipped through today's New York Times. You know, there's no better thing than an actual real-life dead-tree newspaper. I love the sound the pages make when you turn them. The sort of gray curtain they lift up between you and the world. I can't really stand reading text on a computer screen for very long. (Then why am I writing a blog? I will not answer that question.) My eyes get tired and, inevitably, I get sucked into another rousing round of Desktop Defense when I really should be reading about the world's great tragedies. Maybe fifty years from now I'll be telling my grandkids about how newspapers used to be made out of paper.

And then I opened up the latest issue of the New Yorker. You know, after a lot of moving around, after a lot of uncertainty, after the stress of being unemployed - this was it. I was home. I know these writers, these topics - and more importantly, I knew the slightly snooty, supremely well crafted voice of the New Yorker. And what I like best, I reveled in the curiosity of it all. I mean, in the New Yorker you find some of the more interesting tidbits in the entire world.

So I read that magazine with a broad smile on my face. I couldn't wipe it off. For one, there was a wonderful short story by George Saunders, who, if you haven't read him, is in my top three living authors list (which, to give you all fair warning, is probably ten or fifteen names long). For two, there was my favorite New Yorker Cartoon EVER. And then there was a really cool article on Turkmenistan, which was ruled with an iron fist by an absolute psycho - I mean, this megalomaniacal psycho put all those other psychos to shame.

But there was something else. It wasn't that it was peaceful. It was that it was familiar. I was at home with these, these - magazines. More than I was at home anywhere else.

And I thought - do I belong, then, to an invisible nation who loves to read the Times and the Review and the New Yorker and anything else and everything else? Are we lurking out there, in tweed, sipping coffee, criticizing other people's grammar, just waiting to find one another?

Or are we, this invisible nation, people who just press our noses up to the glass of a fancy dinner party served in a fancy manor that is the New Yorker? We can all see the beautiful, urbane people telling their jokes and sipping their wine. And maybe, for a second, just for a second, we can fool ourselves into thinking that we actually belong inside, at the table, perhaps to Hertzberg's left. We think that, given the time and the openness, all those wonderful erudite people would realize that our witty quips were explosive, that our taste in books impressive, that our grammar is - profound. But maybe not. Probably not. Definitely not.

It's more complicated than that. How can I try to lay claim to a community of media, of things that are necessarily mediated and one-sided? To stacks of paper? To a group of people who just, by fancy or by pretense, like reading the same damned stacks of paper.

I thought about this in that thoughtful way that sometimes plagues me. It was very picturesque. Here's me standing on a bridge, looking soulfully down at the rushing river water. A good young American boy. Contemplating the world. Here's me walking with some friends - what's that? an invisible burden on this young man's shoulders? Oh no! Can anyone say bildungsroman? And here's me, in front of a computer, crafting a blog post.

And yet, more than anything in the world, I just want a nice chocolate chip muffin.

Ain't life sure funny sometimes?

Go West, Young Man!

It's the morning, the first morning of my post-graduation, Western life. I am sitting in a cafe, listening to people chattering, the rustle of newspapers and the chaos of cafe life. I am slightly east of the Continental Divide, looking, as we speak, at MOUNTAINS, beautiful, tree-covered, sunny MOUNTAINS which are in - literally - my back yard, feeling Western, with an Akubra hat perched rakishly (well, silly-ly) on my head.
I am unemployed. I have not yet moved in to my new room. I feel scared and ecstatic in about equal proportions.
Check back frequently - not for updates about BORING PERSONAL CRAP... but for writing, commentary, and that sort of thing. Hopefully once a day. But I can't promise anything.