2002-06-06 - 5:11 p.m.
Dee-Dee Ramone died today. Poor guy--always chasing the spotlight only to find that whatever he�s just done, Joey did it first.
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There was a San Diego Press Club mixer for young journalists not far from my house last night but I decided not to go. For one thing, I�m not at all sure I still meet the selection criteria for "young journalist." More importantly, I�ve had this low-intensity sinus-drip thingy for the last several days and I neither felt nor looked like I should be out "mixing." A runny nose and hacking cough hardly make for a fabulous first impression.
So I killed a couple of hours at Borders instead. In general, the local Borders sucks--the Self-Help section is easily five times bigger than either Current Events or Science Fiction, and that abominable Who Moved My Cheese? booklet is stacked everywhere you turn--but I managed to spend way too much money anyway. The casualty list:
* Mike Nelson�s Mind Over Matters. I�m told Movie Megacheese is better, but this one�s pretty damn funny so far. "Ask anyone what a typical electronics store should smell like and you�re likely to get an answer like �batteries� or �wirenuts,� possibly �capacitors.� No one I�ve ever asked ... has answered by saying �pungent body odor.� And yet, you go into your typical RadioShack and that�s what you�re likely to smell first." Hee.
* Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. I have a feeling this book�s going to go down like broccoli and I�ll want to order a Big Mac and large fries afterward just to spite the author, but my social conscience has been nagging me to read it for a while. Plus, the local Sierra Club chapter--which actually has quite a few cool, environmentally aware yet non-annoying people in it, is starting a book discussion group and that�s the first title on the list.
* Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, by Tom Robbins. Recommended by a friend of mine. Must procure weed before opening it.
While we�re talking about books, has anyone out there read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in its entirety? It lost me about a third of the way in and I�ve had zero interest in finishing it. (Right now it�s sitting on my to-be-read/go-back-to-later shelf, next to a copy of Infinite Jest that has a half-inch-deep coating of dust on it.) Usually I worry about losing my hipster cred when I fail to complete a book like that one, but in this case I�m thinking that writing an impossible-to-finish novel was the author�s intention all along and letting it turn to compost partially-read means I�m in on the joke, which thereby increases my hipster-cred a hundredfold. Or maybe it just means I spend too much time looking for irony where none exists and if my loved ones don�t do an intervention on me soon I�m going to meta myself to death.
I can stop being ironic anytime I want to. Really.
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"Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood"? Whoever programmed Hollywood�s random chick-flick name generator should get a hefty bonus for that one.
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