Chapter 2

Everyone I know is doing summer reading. By everyone, I mean one person. Sort of. I have this competitive nature, I think, and as a result, I decided to start reading books too. That and I was bored. So very, very bored. The only problem with my doing summer reading is I used to read a lot. Like --- a whole lot. I used to carry around four or five books at a time in school. This being the case, I've manage to read most of the books I've ever wanted to read, and I'm a pretty lazy guy, so I don't really look for new books. I tend to rely on the phenomenon of recommendations, but those seem to come few and far between these days. Also, I'm pretty poor, and the only book I want (The Mad Ones) just came out, and hardback is upwards of 30 dollars.

So, I found my old books, and started reading one. I picked the one I had read the fewest amount of times (twice --- three times now). It was Lolita, by V-dog Nobakizzy, or Vladamir Nobokov, for those of you who can't understand my steezy translations. The story is probably the most honest depiction of a love story I have ever read, which (to some people) is troubling, because the narrative is pretty much entirely about the main character (Humbert Humbert) and his reluctant and remorsful lust for a young girl (the "Lolita", if you will... the book does, so why shouldn't you?) and her eventual manipulation of him as a weak individual.

The whole point of this is, Humbert is absolutely in love with this girl who is twenty years his junior, and makes it very apparant throughout, and I absolutely love the story. Mostly because it was the exact opposite of everything I had ever seen before that.

When I was a kid, my parents didn't have a lot of time to raise me, so they let Walt Disney do it. I could work a VCR before I could get myself food, and I spent days on end watching, rewinding, and, in some cases, memorizing Disney movies. Alladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and others like them because my model for what adulthood would be, and ultimately what love would look like. So, I'm kind of curious what sort of effect that had on me. I tried, obviously, to treat my first relationship like those movies. I emulated behavior, adopted policies, and went about things in a similar fashion as all the characters in every movie I had ever seen.

Needless to say, that relationship failed miserably.

In retrospect, I wonder if my glossed up image of what life could be like is the result that I often find myself searching for dysfunction in the things around me. Growing up, I was subjected to Disney depictions of romance and love, characitures of family life (like Full House, and Family Matters), and images of over-sexed teens, pretending they had completely pure intentions (Yes, I listened to boy bands, and girl pop singers.). Don't get me wrong.

I'm not saying life is a mud puddle, and God is dead, and the Machine is trying to eat me, and the Man is keeping me down, and all that good stuff. I am saying that the life I'm living now (albeit pretty satisfying as of late --- good food, good friends, good health) is pretty lackluster compared to what the propaganda machine that was the '90's had me set up for.

But maybe I'm just angsty because I realized that I will not, in fact, be 18 forever. I won't always be young and in love. I AM, apparently, a touch over-rated. I DO feel left out even though I'm NOT in the middle.

And maybe I'm pissed because I can't work the modifier "faux" into conversation more often.

Chapter 1

Farrah Fawcett died today at the age of 62.

For those people who (some how or another) don't know who Farrah Fawcett was, she was a television actress in the seventies. Her most public role was in the original Charlie's Angels series as Jill Munroe. More importantly, she spent about twenty five years as a masturbatory aid, hanging, in poster form, on the bedroom walls of our preceding generation. Mrs. Fawcett, being such a large part of so many young men's lives, will surely be missed.

This calls to mind a strange phenominon. We are all guilty, myselft included, of growing attached to people we have never ever met. I, for instance, have developed a liking for Brad Pitt. I can say that I enjoy him as an actor, but that would mostly just be covering my tracks. Really, the way I feel about Brad Pitt mirrors the way I feel about some of the people I went to highschool with. I see Brad Pitt as an old friend, who, if I were to be reunited with, we could share all sorts of inside jokes and tell stories about that time we did that thing at that place with those people, and the subsequent stuff happened.

The obvious reality is that I have never ever met Brad Pitt in my life. I doubt I've even walked on the same ground that Brad Pitt once walked on. I know Brad Pitt so little that the only reason I feel so comfortably referring to him as "Brad Pitt" is because Wikipedia tells me that he is most commonly referred to as such rather than "William," or "Will," or even "Bill". I know nothing about Brad Pitt as a person. All my best representations of who Brad Pitt is come from his movies, and I feel it entirely safe to say that Brad Pitt is not at all who he is represented to be when he is playing Tyler Durden (of Fight Club), or Mr. Smith (of Mr. and Mrs. Smith), or Rusty (of Oceans 11, 12, 13, and (I'm certain) eventually 14). So why do I have such an attachment to Brad Pitt, and as a result, his films?

Yeah. So what's the deal with that?

Preface

At some point in my life (Probably midway through a documented account of a failed attempt to find the American Dream --- there is no way to be certain, though) I came to the conclusion that someday I wanted to write. Being a writer never seemed to me as much of a respectable profession, which, to be wholly honest, made it all the more appealing to me. It is my passive desire to end my life as a Journalist.

Now, when I say I want to be a journalist, the majority of those hearing me assume they know what I'm driving at. For the sake of clarification, I have no interest in being the next Walter Cronkite, or Wolf Blitzer, or, God help me, a young Glenn Beck. I don't care to discuss the turnings of the gears to the political machine, or debate (outside of living rooms, at least) the value of a full-scale land invasion in the Twenty-first century. I am far more interested in writing about things that don't matter now, will not matter in the future, and barely mattered when they happened.

To put it bluntly, I want to do what Klosterman does.

This (we)b-log is mostly a stretching excercise. It's something to fill time between work, and sleep, and to expediate the process of my waiting for my phone to ring. It's something to keep me from taking too seriously Freudian analysis of old Family Matters re-runs at two in the morning. This is bound to be a mixed bag. Some days it will be quasi-intellectual, cryptic and inevitably childish. Some days it will be lazy and --- whatever.

If you read it, tell me. Tell me what you think. Help me out. If not, I'll probably lie and say I'm just doing it for myself. I'm very gullable sometimes.