To anyone who happened to be inside KGB Bar last Friday night: I sincerely apologize for my table’s bad behavior.
To the doorman who somehow caught me trying to leave with three rocks glasses of vodka placed securely inside my friend’s handbag: My bad. I realize now that wasn’t cool.
A woman strolls out of Push My Swing pre-school on 29th and Lexington, and I walk by and for the first time in a long time feel an unusual type of happiness. She looks around 30. Worn-out but happy. Dressed business-casual and probably just done visiting her kid during her lunch break.
I wonder if someday I might want a child after all and this makes me giddy with anticipation. I smile at her; authentically, even, somehow; she returns the courtesy. I feel happy.
No sooner do I pass her than I approach a dilapidated Laundromat. It looks dirty and smells bad. Two men sleep under an awning that hangs over sacks of garbage, their torn clothes stained and beards showing. My selfish grin becomes an expression of sheer terror as the reality of their plight confronts me. Both are someone’s child, living amid unending misery that’s indescribable. How could I responsibly help create a child when life resembles unending hell?
I couldn’t.
I feel unhappy. I feel terrible and cursed, as though I’m responsible for it all. Then I remember that, partially, I am.
I suppose I feel human.
While I drank bourbon, a woman at a bar near Grammercy last night sat next to me reading this and sipping what smelled like vodka on rocks, and I couldn’t think of a thing worth saying. I remember trying to digest this book once, well before the soul-crushing nature of reality taught me the horrifying things humans are capable of and the terrible ambiguity of my own existence and impending mortality. I doubt I was reading it right.
I’m not working on Friday, so maybe I’ll start reading it again at that same bar and see what happens.
Just did three miles in Central Park at not much better than a damn snail’s pace. I can think of better ways to burn 500 calories. (Image via.)
“A flower taller than a man, stinking strongly of putrefying roadkill and colored deep burgundy to mimic rotting flesh, sounds like something from a low-budget science fiction movie. But Indonesia’s titan arum—or “corpse flower,” as known by locals—is a real, if rare, phenomenon, pollinated in the wild by carrion-seeking insects.”
— From the July 18, 2003 issue of National Geographic News
CNN just reported that this thing is in bloom once again in California, though for some irritating reason that broadcast story isn’t on its web site yet.
I’ve been away for awhile. Which means it was time to replenish a dwindled supply of the sole commodity that allows me to grapple with the utter heartbreak of the human condition – bourbon – this evening. Which is when this fucking day sped from routine but nevertheless soul-crushing anxiety (typical) to frenzied angst over everything in sight (not ideal).
A dumpy liquor store sits near the foot of the cement-stack I work in. It’s in that horrid neighborhood one stop south of Midtown on the 6 Train. But the bourbon I usually buy is around twenty bucks.
There’s little rationale behind what makes peoples’ ears bleed, and I expect it’s different for everyone. There was a long line. I grabbed my bottle and got in it.
Two women stood behind me with three bottles of white wine. One asked the questions; the other gave the answers. The question-asker asked if the answer-giver had a good time last night. The answer-giver said she did, and then informed the question-asker she had her time with someone other than whoever she was dating. She used the term “kind-of dating,” but, … well, semantics.
The dude who got lucky, the answer-giver said, was such as nice guy. She said he was in a band, that he worked part-time as a recruiter. That they had a nice conversation and ate Mediterranean food. That he was “also an actor, you know” by virtue of his SAG membership. And that her kind-of boyfriend, who she had seen on Tuesday because it was his birthday and who was acting like a major dick then, should totally be jealous of this sensitive, artistic soul who had the privilege of consuming food with and speaking to her. That he should envy the “other guy” – the answer-giver, she actually said those words, her shrill, WASPy vernacular making my eyeballs itch – because … well, she ended her baffling condemnation with the word, “so,” as in, “Seriously, Jake had bettered be better or else this other guy might catch more of my interest, umm, you know, so…,” which irritates me to no end because, umm, well, so, what?.
I put my bottle back on the shelf and picked up a bigger one.
Right then, it was simply unbearable to know that that’s how people have talked, and that’s how some people probably were talking, right then, at that very instance, about me. I stared at my bottle of bourbon in utter, frenzied despair, knowing that both it and I have exactly the same intrinsic value to most everyone outside my own joyless soul. That I, like that sweet, merciful concoction that represents a dim glimmer of solace among a world whose only payoff is a subdued desire for that “let’s make it through one more day, I guess” self-preservation and nothing else at all, are but commodities to be used up, discarded, and forgotten by roving piles of carbon masquerading as humans but indistinguishable from aliens or dragons or zombies or whatever else keeps people up all damn night.
At this point, the stereotypical humorous anecdote to lighten the thunderous mood I had acquired was remembering that the bourbon and I differ in that I enjoy Mediterranean food and it couldn’t possibly, although now in retrospect I wonder if it might.
But I could probably care a lot less about all of that. I could probably stand a reminder that, regardless of whatever illusions might emerge after the frequent occasions whereby people in my industry take their hands off their iPhones long enough to jerk each other off, no one is much different from that babbling jezebel and her gum-chewing friend, and manipulating oneself into thinking otherwise is intellectual cannibalism. Humans are the most terrible, gluttonous animals imaginable, but they’re also the most interesting.
You should probably all just un-follow now.
Dear Jody Hill, Seth Rogen, Anna Faris, and all the assholes involved in greenlighting, producing, and marketing such utterly awful material:
We are not going to see “Observe and Report,” and I want to make things clear. I am not refusing to see it because it isn’t my type of movie, or because I am a person of delicate sensibilities who cannot handle “edgy” humour. I am refusing to see it because after reading numerous reviews and interviews with all of you that NOT EVEN ONE OF YOU thought very carefully or even, hell, at all about the issues involved in making a scene in which someone not only screws an unconscious person, but such act is “made okay” (per Mr. Rogen) because she drunkenly murmured something in the middle of the act. (More)
They describe it as “the top 100 books that have shaped the lives of individual men while also helping define broader cultural ideas of what it means to be a man.”
I would be interested in seeing the top 100 books that have shaped the lives of individual women while also helping define broader cultural ideas of what it means to be women.What would that list look like?
- A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf
- Little Women - L M Alcott
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
- The Color Purple - Alice Walker
- Pride and Prejudice - Austen
- Jane Eyre - Bronte
- Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
A few from the top of my head.
It’s an odd suggestion — and, given that I’m male, it’s probably ill-informed — but I’d add Palahniuk’s* Invisible Monsters as not an example of a text that has shaped the lives of many women, but as one that reflects some contemporary issues females face in Western society, and does so brilliantly.
* I’m of the mindset that Palanhiuk’s prose, while seeming mostly masculine, actually has strong feminine underpinnings. I also thought his novel Fight Club was a work of romanticism. You probably disagree; I’m used to it.
I have read only 20 of these. I guess they are a man’s library, so I would not be expected to. Especially considering this list was entirely gendered and contained only books by male authors or books with strong masculine protagonists. Bullshit. I am a well-read person and these lists will not undermine my faith in my intellect.
That said, I’d also like to point out that at least half of the books I did read from this list I did not enjoy. And I have at least 20 of the ones I have not yet read on my bookshelf in Victoria. So yeah.
This list is really good reading advice for everyone, not just men. There’s a nice balance between accessible literature (Krakauer, some of the classics, and others) and texts that are more challenging (Joyce, obviously; and Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Aristotle).
