Antisocial Media

This comic runs in one of the local free tabloids. Kind of hit or miss, but this week's edition killed me: Well done, Robert T. Balder! I may finally be ready to, as it has been said, rock.

True, I didn't think California would be like this, but I don't know how it could be different, either. Sitting on the deck tonight, hearing the resonant tones of the metal wind chimes, and the sorrowful plunks of the bamboo ones, and smelling the jasmine on the breeze; hearing the constant low roar of the highway (even at three in the morning), but also the distant lament of the train horn; and seeing a few stars through the orange-purple night sky...I thought California would be different, but I didn't expect it to be this much the same. {EdNote: This image is of a print by Raymond Pettibon, one that I had the privelege to live with for a semester of college thanks to Oberlin's Art Rental program and my excellent housemate Josh Adler. I think about it every time the thought "Wow, California isn't how I thought it would be," crosses my mind. Kind of grim, no?}

Pleasing taste; some monster-ism.

Funny that I should have spent so much of yesterday writing about All the King's Men , and spent all of today being driven slowly nuts by a facial tic above the left side of my lip. Seriously, it's making me crazy. In the novel, The Great Twitch was Jack Burden's (ultimately failed) metaphor for the senselessness of life, that life is so random that all our behaviors and interactions might as well be random twitches of muscle fiber. I don't think that what I've got constitutes a Great Twitch, but it certainly is a persistent one.

So I had a great post written on questions of agency and identity as explored through Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and High Fidelity (I focussed more on the film by Stephen Frears than on the original Nick Hornby book), and it mysteriously disappeared. I, of course, blame the government . The crux of my post was that letting outside events and relationships with other people shape your life is fundamentally selfish , and that each of us bears responsibility for claiming our own agency . One of my favorite lines from Richard Linklater's Waking Life is an offhanded remark by a passerby , late in the movie, who tells the nameless protagonist (played by Wiley Wiggins ) "As the pattern becomes more complex , it is no longer sufficient to be swept along," or something like the same. The patterns are becoming more complex, and we face peril if we are satisfied with passivity. But, like I said, that post got erased, so here's a BMW z3 Coupe,