Bullshit

Jeesh. I am right now as I type this sitting in an Au Bon Pain in New Brunswick, on College Avenue. Where I attended college, actually, though my memories of this period of my life, as with any period of my life, are vague. I wandered about a bit thinking, ah, yes, I have stood in this spot before, but that’s about as far as my creaking old brain goes. College Years Jeff might as well be some other person.

IN fact, this Au Bon Pain wasn’t here when I attended school. I am outraged that the universe evolves without my direct participation.

I’m here because The Duchess is running a half marathon. Yesterday, we got up early and drove down here to pick up her bib, and it was frustrating because there were absolutely no signs anywhere telling you where to go, and my memories of Busch Campus are as vague as my memories of everything else, resulting in us driving around for a while while I frowned and mumbled things like “Ah, I think I went to a party in those apartments once …”

For the record, The Duchess does not care where I went to a party once.

So, we ran late in getting the race bib, and then had to race into Manhattan to participate in “The Future: What Does It Mean” event sponsored by Asis&t Metro. Fellow author David Louis Edelman and I had been tapped as Science Fiction authors to declaim on our vision of the future and information technology and such. It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed David’s presentation and the conversation that ensued, despite arriving in a flurry of harried incompetence, having forgotten all my notes, books, and other items in my rush to get there on time.

David Louis Edelman impressed me, and I’m really looking forward to reading his books, and so should you. For serious.

Then, The Duchess and I had to rush back to Jersey to attend a dinner that had been in the works for a few weeks which we also barely managed to make on time. And then, drunk and full, I went home and to bed. Which means subjectively, yesterday took about three minutes to elapse.

And now I’m back in New Brunswick, having dropped The Duchess off, sitting in Au Bon Pain waiting for her to finish the race. This weekend didn’t even happen, from my point of view.

You’re Eating Yourself, You Don’t Believe It

(Originally published in Angry Thoreauan #28, Easter, 2001)

Back in College, my room-mates Jeof and Ken and I once decided to make a movie. Back then we had lots of ideas, most of which ended in dispiriting failure and occasional emergency room visits, unlike today when the last ten ideas I had were variations on the lets get a drink theme. Back then it didn’t seem so crazy that we would make a movie with a single video camera, no money, actors, or experience. Why not? We were, after all, brilliant, or so we thought. I still don’t know what went wrong — all the signs of unrecognized genius were there: General messiness, absent-mindedness, bad grades, ennui, depression. I suppose it’s easy to make a mistake, since those are also, apparently, the signs of dumbness.

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Friends, my brother Yan is going to be moving soon, and I of course have been drafted to aid him in this endeavor. Yan is not my brother’s real name. I call him Yan to protect his dignity, of which he has little. A few seconds of Googling likely will reveal his true identity, though why you would want it is beyond me. Yan is not very interesting. He is, in fact, a terrible, awful person who is going to make me haul about 300,000 metric tons of books from his old home to his new one. WE HATES HIM.

No, not really. We love Yan! His antics are quite amusing. But I thought I was done hauling freight in exchange for a few beers and some hearty thanks a loooong time ago. Like back in the 20th fucking century. It’s 2012, people. The world is going to assplode in a few months and I am spending my precious final hours hauling books.

Here at Somers Castle, I’ve been trying to rid myself of Things That Must Be Stored.

I used to be the King of All That Must Be Stored. It’s a genetic thing; my family has always kept everything. Bent, rusted screws? You never know, throw them in a jar. Winter jackets from when I was eight years old? You never know, hang them in a closet. I took this training with me and when I first lived on my own I was hauling a lot of stuff around with me.

About a decade ago I had a moment of clarity and have been trying to clean out my life, and I’ve had a lot of success. I realized that a lot of stuff I was hauling for nostalgic purposes had pretty much lost its meaning – if you haven’t spoken to someone in 20 years, do you really need to keep meaningless trinkets? And I used a bit of tough love on myself when it came to old computer equipment and CD-Roms filled with ancient software packages I don’t need any more. I mean, my god, I had shit I couldn’t even identify, pushed into envelopes marked MAYBE IMPORTANT WHO THE FUCK KNOWS. That’s how bad it is.

Currently, I’m largely divested. My CDs: In the trash, everything ripped to MP3s and stored on redundant DVDs. Paperwork, scanned. Trinkets thrown away if i can’t place their significance within five seconds. If I don’t burst into tears upon seeing the fucking things, I do not give a fuck about them anymore.

This is the End of Storage. I used to wonder where to jam everything. I used to sit and study the closets in the small, cramped old apartments I rented, pondering creative ways to get more shit into them. The digital world is freeing up so much damn space I can’t believe how much stuff I was hauling around with me. At a certain point in the future, I could actually imagine living someplace without much storage at all. Just enough to hold a few hundred DVDs — or, ultimately, a single humming RAID array, holding everything. Photos. Music. Manuscripts. Correspondence. All the paperwork of being an adult in the modern world.

The only problem: Books.

Ah, you say, you’re a moron, because books have been solved. I am a moron, this is true. But I’m also still kind of suspicious of eBooks in general, because corporations keep offending me with their blatant disrespect for consumer rights. As I’ve wheezed on before, when I purchase a physical book, I own that sucker. I can lend it, sell it, turn it into origami elephants. Whatever I like, because I own that sumbitch. When I buy an eBook, I am merely purchasing permission to read it and hang onto to it for as long as the seller lets me. Maybe I can loan it or resell it, but that’s determined by the rights holder, and the rights I have can be changed at any time, which means, of course they are not rights at all, are they? Jebus, the content of the book can be changed. On my device. Without my permission.

This is what scientists term bullshit.

So, books remain problematic. I would go get a Kindle or a Nook or whatever in a flash if I could actually own the digital files I purchased, if I could lend them and resell them to used eBook stores and all that jazz. Universally, across the board, without jumping through hoops. And then I could get rid of all these bookshelves and live in some sort of THX-1138 white world, unencumbered by all this stuff.

At which point, no doubt, we will all have holograms of bookshelves and piles of boxes beaming on our white walls, as it will become cool to have a mess everywhere. At least then I’ll be ahead of the game.