Bullshit

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.

Here is a post of randomness:

PAGE 69 IS MISSING: Jebus. Last year I pulled out an old manuscript from my typewriter days. Meaning there are 100 pages of typewritten prose and no electronic record anywhere aside from a PDF scan that has no OCR capabilities. Meaning that if I wanted to do something with it, I’d need to keyboard it. I thought, what the hell. What else do I have to do between liver transplants and crying jags? Nothing. Besides, I had an idea about ruthlessly editing it down to novella-size, just because. I figure something I wrote so long ago must be filled with juvenilia-type bullshit, so cutting it by 50% is probably being gentle.

I’ve been slowly grinding on this. Keyboard is no fun, so it’s slow. And yesterday I took a glance forward, because I am old and brain-damaged and cannot even remember the plot of my own novels any more, and guess what? Page sixty-nine of the goddamn manuscript is missing.

Now, this is not that big a deal, right? 200-300 words, tops, missing. On the other hand, it’s so frustrating I want to track you down and set your house on fire just to see it burn.

THE DENTIST IS THE MOST AWKWARD SOCIAL INTERACTION IN YOUR LIFE. Forget the teen-aged register jockey you have to buy condoms and tampons from at midnight at 7-11, the Dentist is so awkward I try to make myself pass out on purpose when I get into that chair. I just had my teeth cleaned. Aside from the fact that my dentist uses a red-colored polish that always – always! – makes me think I am bleeding to death when I rinse.

The rest of the time, let’s face it, someone has their hands in your mouth and is breathing directly onto your face. Granted, that’s how most of my social interactions go, but at least I’m drunk).

HAPPY NEW YEAR. My New Year’s Eve was spent eating and drinking and staring at a cat sitting on my chest, rising and falling as I breathed. or, struggled to breathe, as the cat in question weighs 22 pounds. The resulting oxygen deprivation caused a series of hallucinations, most involving my pants as sentient beings and a universe where Lana Del Rey doesn’t exist.

Some friends of The Duchess hail from Kentucky, and for my Xmas gift they went and bought some ridiculously cheap bourbon for me and drove it back up to Jersey. Apparently in Kentucky bourbon is handed out on street corners and children can taste-test the sweet syrup of life from an early age. A glorious state it must be. I might move there. I might move there an establish some new Whiskey Free State. Why not? All I have are the aforementioned liver transplants and crying jags to look forward to.

fin

So, to recap:

• I was on a series of planes for what seemed like six years
• I received a speeding ticket from the Unfriendliest State Police Officer In the World
• Two minutes after that ticket, I was rear-ended while sitting placidly at a red light, contemplating my sins vis-a-vis excessive speed
• I then figured the State of Texas owed me something, so I bought some lottery tickets while waiting for the local police to come take a report, and won nothing
• Shortly after that I ate a delicious dinner until I passed out and woke to discover one of my brothers-in-law had bought me a bottle of Glenmorangie, The Original.

Conclusion: GOD BLESS US, EVERY ONE!

So, it’s Christmas Eve, which for us lapsed Catholics and damned Christians means lots of boozing and gifts and more boozing and Italian Food. Or something. So I’m slightly drunk, and part of what I’m drunk on is Hudson New York Corn Whiskey, which is basically moonshine passed through modern filtration and safety standards. In short, it’s the pur distilled alcohol from corn mash, without all that tedious mucking about with wine casks that makes real whiskey so delicious.

I wanted to try it just to see what it was like, and it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever tasted. But I do think there’s a reason people prefer their corn mash after it’s spent several years, if not decades, mellowing in casks. After trying the Corn, I’d vote to let whiskies sit in casks for centuries.

It’s too sweet, and has no character at all. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve long suspected this rise of “white whiskies” is just a way for distillers to sell off stock without having to wait years for it to mature. By US law, it has to sit in a cask for 2 weeks in order to be considered legal whiskey. I’m sure these bastards would walk it through a room filled with casks and call it done, if they could. In short: If you like whiskey, you will likely not like Corn or White Whiskey. If you enjoy going blind, you might.

For my actual Christmas Day, I will be drinking continuously from a bottle of Early Times. Which isn’t much better.