TODAY, ACCORDING TO MY IPHONE

Since I don't talk to a lot of people from high school anymore, when I go home I really go home. This state of affairs used to make me sad, but then I grew up. Did I really used to think that laying on the couch, watching basketball, eating rice and curry, drinking wine, hanging out with my parents, reading, and cuddling with cats was boring? Yeesh.

And oh man--quite the March Madness this year. People are always really confused when they find out how obsessed I am with college basketball ("Didn't you watch a football game for the first time in 2008...on TV? Aren't you the person who has never seen a pro basketball game? You like a sport?!") but March Madness always gets me going. Long live the underdog--unless the underdog is playing OSU, MSU, Duke, or Xavier.

Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana.

--Don DeLillio, White Noise

“Can you tell me another bedtime story about how people are special and every one of us matters? Can you tell me that shit?”

--David Simon, from an interview with Jesse Pearson

EXISTENTIAL DREAD ON THE PLAYGROUND

Elliot: Living. It is so hard.
My mom: What do you think would be easier? Non-living?
Elliot: Oh, I don't know. Maybe being a turtle. Or a bug.
Mom: Yes, that might be easier. but then you would miss your family and friends. Would you like to take your shoes off now?
Elliot: [sighing deeply] I've forgotten how to bend.

--Conversation between my mom and Elliot (b. 2005)

Yeah, still great.

YOU ARE WORTH HUNDREDS OF SPARROWS

Things I found today while searching for other things:

01. One Polaroid postcard in Thus Spoke Zarathustra
02. One photograph of me and Greg in As I Lay Dying
03. Two photographs from my Portland pen-pal in The Essential Rumi
04. Two love letters in Diving for Sunken Treasure
05. Twelve photographs of my family in The Elegant Universe

So rare, these days, to find photographs and letters hiding in books. Let's do that more often.




On one hand, today was perfectly sunny and lovely. On the other hand, three years ago Alex and I talked about how it was only a matter of time before Mark Linkous killed himself and today he went and did it.

Who, me? Oh, I'm doing just fine.

IMAGINE THAT

INTERVIEWER: The Franklin Library is bringing out a deluxe edition of Slaughterhouse-Five, I believe.
VONNEGUT: Yes. I was required to write a new introduction for it.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have any new thoughts?
VONNEGUT: I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn't shorten the war by half a second, didn't weaken a German defense or attack anywhere, didn't free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited—not two or five or ten. Just one.
INTERVIEWER: And who was that?
VONNEGUT: Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that.

--From a collection of interviews with Kurt Vonnegut