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2 September 2008
My four-year hiatus from academia is over. Half of my first class at Georgetown was an introduction to WordPress, the same software in which this is being composed. I’m still optimistic.
Between Once and Man on Wire, there’s an undercurrent in my choice of cinema this past weekend of little things — pop songs and filament-tied-to-an-arrow […]
4 December 2007
As the Broadway stagehand strike closed and I rushed the box office for a ticket to “Cyrano de Bergerac” last weekend (and will do the same for “Rock ‘n’ Roll” before too long), I was reminded—as I was more consistently my last weekend in California than even I have recently allowed my introspection to persist—the extent to which my life is a bento box.
4 November 2007
Upon describing my apartment to my mother during a phone conversation (rather recently, already months after I’d moved in), annotating from my punch list—paint, halogen, cabinet hardware, and so on—she succinctly restated my bloviating with the phrase, “you’re living in a before.” One of the constants in my life is asymmetry, and I find myself applying this imbalance I once disdained as a lens of optimism to separate the apex of my existence from, more or less where I am now, its midpoint, with an ambition to set a median greater than the mean. What that ambition comprises, however, I have yet to cohere into a uniform and quantifiable after.
24 September 2007
Had I visited Montréal when I was 19, buying too much second-hand music, attuned to markers of soi-disant hipness through vodka hazes, and leading a life of dissipation, dressed in dubious vintage, it would’ve been the place I would’ve liked to grow old. It strikes me as a stubbornly unique place, the one city in all of North America that acknowledges its European colonial heritage as integral to its identity — Vieux-Port cobblestones, haute cuisine, and all things vintage — under a Francophone umbrella.
11 April 2007
I had tried, or I should say, I am still trying and writing and researching and conversing and attempting to construct a narrative that somehow casts the activities of my European vacations and the months between as myth and metaphor, a microcosm of the improvisational information architecture, anomalies of sociology, and decline of western civilization in the first decade of the 21st century. Given the pretentious mess that promises to be, this chapter of my pop-music autobiography may be the closest thing to a straight narrative of my week’s sojourn in Brussels and Paris, 11-19 November 2006, I might extract from that unwieldy text.
6 November 2006
I’ve been trying to quantify what it means to be older, to understand the process by which one adapts the tropes of the aged. I wonder if an elder conscience is one that no longer adjudicates between what is right and what is wrong but between what can be forgiven and what can not be forgiven, if wisdom is the knowledge of how much injustice one can inflict and withstand and experience the consequence of inflicting and withstanding injustice. It is a fact of our physiology that we become more attuned to bitterness and less attracted to sweetness as we age, but in what science is the bond forged between idealism (or wonderment or creativity or innocence) and saccharinity? Is cynicism the olive of attitude, that briny defense mechanism we only grow to appreciate once we can suck it out of the bottom of a cocktail glass emptied of gin?
4 August 2006
A coworker told me a story today about his experience at a lobbying firm for whom RJ Reynolds was a client, particularly about the bowls and trays of free cigarette packs in their lobbies and offices. At the time he didn’t smoke, and he felt ashamed taking them until he saw that wealthier and more powerful visitors habitually stuffed their pockets full of free cigarettes, at which point he started stockpiling smokes for his mother and sisters.
Now, around this time, RJ Reynolds acquired Kraft and their American-cheese singles empire and thus diversified the gratis platter in their lobby, at which point in the story I quipped that my coworker had at least once in his past “a safari jacket stuffed with Velveeta and cigarettes.”
2008 November 11
Some families set their dramas on the stage of a castle, a city apartment, a suburban bungalow. Mine was wed to the four wheels of a 1990 Toyota truck.
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