Of Works, II

The Gears

One moment we’re riding our bike and the next we’re on our back, trying to figure out how the sky got down there. Nothing hurts, until we try to move, then everything hurts, so we lie on the ground until we can handle breathing again. We sit up and assess the damage: the front wheel of our bike is toast. It looks like a strangely stylized letter D. Thinking without thinking: Destruction. Dimwit. Derriere. We stand, heft the frame onto our back, and start walking home.

Of One Year Gone

2011 has slithered off into the nether regions of history and I, for one, am glad of it. For me, it was a year marked mostly by heartbreak (at my friends shuffling out of my life for one reason or another) and frustration (at the incessant fuckmuppetry of humanity in general and our government in particular).

It isn't that nothing good happened; it's that those moments were mere punctuation in the novella of raucous bullshit that was 2011.

Of Vegas

When I finished Fallout: New Vegas, I spent a lot of time thinking about what my motivations were for playing. I realized, about halfway through the game, that I had subconsciously developed a narrative for my character, independent of the framework of the game proper. I started the game and set out on the main quest reluctantly; as I walked through the wasteland to the Strip, each step came down with the force of a heavy sigh. I did not want to be involved with the machinations of this man who'd shot me in the head. I wanted to be left alone, and so it seemed that in order to live my life peacefully, I'd have to do what I could to stabilize the region. To that end, I aligned myself with House. I did not want to involve myself with the NCR, as they merely wanted to reinstate the broken democracy that led the world to its current state of decay. Caesar's ideology was intensely repugnant; I cannot abide slavery. I think of the idea of owning people and something inside me recoils and snaps, hissing and spitting. I could have seized power for myself, I suppose. But no. No, I did not want the responsibility, and in the vacuum of my inevitable abdication, there would have been only more strife.

Of the 53%

I have spent my adult life thus far working to feed, clothe, and house myself.

I have faced hardship and adversity on occasion, and done so with a small amount of grace.

But I am a thinking person.

As such, I am capable of recognizing a few things:

Of a Brush With Fame

I probably met a porn star once.

This was while I was a register biscuit at a used bookstore: I was at said register when a strikingly familiar-looking lady came in and started browsing the science fiction section. I stared at her for a minute or two, wondering where I knew her from; eventually, I realized I was having a hard time recognizing her because I'd never seen her with clothes on. Obviously, the next step was to talk to her.

This presented some difficulties.

Of Freedom: Director's Cut

This is a paragraph that I wrote about Freedom for my last entry but didn't include because it didn't fit the tone. I still think it's pretty funny on its own, though, so here you go.

I just finished Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It had this strange, constant dramatic pressure that would build as it subsided, so invariably congruous that it could not be said to be cyclical. Reading it was like taking a dump that never stops, just snakes endlessly out of your ass into the luminous depths of your hyper-toilet.

Of Freedom

After two weeks, I'm finally done with Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. In an alternate dimension, I'm still reading it, and will be reading it forever, just like in another, altogether different place, I'm still watching The Sound of Music and listening to American Pie.

The takeaway, in short: I'm amazed that Franzen was able to build a book that I was unable to stop reading out of settings I don't give a shit about, characters I uniformly hated and themes that were old hat in the fifties.