every love story is a chicken story

"He was still battling to make a movie 

when snapshots were all his newly-sobered mind was offering."

It arrived two days ago in the mail. If I hadn't been so busy, I'd have made it mine on the day of its release.

I can't attest to the quality of the whiskey book, but all the rest are--at worst--decent enough.

When I read it (present tense: reeeeed it), I read it with iPod in hand, looking up all the references and words I don't understand, wondering why, exactly, it was that my father always discouraged my reading Derrida. Off and on listening to Brian Eno. It's a testimony to the book's wholesome and satisfying denseness that I am only on page 142 after two days with it in the house. I read Infinite Jest itself much faster than this.

DT Max, ya did good. Your love for the subject is evident on every page and I have not a single complaint.

Brian Eno - Everything Merges With the Night

I've been waiting all evening

Possibly years I don't know

Counting the passing hours

Everything merges with the night

I stand on the beach

Giving out descriptions

Different for everyone I see

Since I just can't remember

Longer than last September.

"The Big Ship" is far prettier, but I couldn't resist the lyrics and title of the above, which seem straight from my dreams of late--especially a certain long one I've not yet shared with anyone, but may.

On an unrelated subject (but not really), I was tickled by David Sandlin's anxiety art on Monday in the Times. 

Click here to see the rest. It's well worth the jump.

Judging by the comments, a lot of people didn't like it, found it depressing. Fuck them, this is hilarious!

I remember once an older woman confronted me about my writing and by extension my personality, called me "lugubrious" and said I brought down all the people around me, who would all be so much happier if only I would spontaneously begin instead to chirp merrily "like a well-fed chickie." Possibly she hadn't actually seen many real life chicks, because I'm pretty sure they chirp more out of hunger, loneliness, and distress, not with the warmth of contentment as she supposed. Furthermore, one really has to wonder about people who tell other people that they ought to behave as if their empty tummies were actually full. I have noticed that such individuals almost always self-conceptualize as kind, nurturing types. Curious, that.

But, really, who's to say I'm not laughing as I write this nonsense? Sometimes I rightly am. And this comic cracks me up. I want it on my office wall. I'd laugh every day.

Well, until it seemed trite.