12/17/09

No Love For Nothing

Okay.  I'm writing a novel.  This will take years probably, and I'm not sure how to fit it in with all my book lists and coffee brewing...but it feels organic and right to me.  This will be non-fiction and will be roughly 80% autobiographical.  Or maybe 77%?



Exciting.











12/13/09

Generation Why?

Echo Boomers.  The MTV Generation.  The Millennials. 

Not friggin' even.

I have come to realize something.  Something rather serious.  It started as a question, a feeling that started (I think) early in high-school.  Now, I realize a lot of people have a lot of questions that start (they think) early in high-school.  But this one has only grown, and become more concrete over time...

And now, I know the answer.

I have always felt that I do not relate to my peers, my people.  Not just on an "interests/activities/about me" level.  On a way deeper, essence-of-my-being level.  This (I have smartly deduced) is because we belong to the first generation to have no true, unifying identity.  Think about it, since at least the beginning of the 20th century (and definitely far beyond that, really) every decade, every generation of people has  had a general identity.  Something to be known for.  The60's with their free love, and the 80's with their free drugs.  But not us.  Sure I was born in the 90's.  But I was not a part of the Seattle movement.  Or the Spice Girls.  Or Titanic.  My coming of age years belonged to a time where all we have is terrorist attacks and qwerty keyboards.  Obviously we have advanced on other generations' antics and achievements, but we have nothing to call our own.  Nothing new.  Nothing specific.  Just filtered re-hashings of times long passed.  Trends designed to to make us feel nostalgiac for things we never we were never even a part of the first time.  


We need an identifier.  Something to tie us to each other.  But for now we are just twittering along, updating our lonely, unrelatable statuses as we go...


12/8/09

Book List 2010

This is a New Year's resolution, to read all the books (in no particular order) on this list by Dec. 31st 2010. 

  1. Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Lives by Chuck Klosterman (finished)
  2. Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman (finished)
  3. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman
  4. Love Is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield
  5. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
  6. Polaroids From the Dead by Douglas Copeland
  7. Paint it Black by Janet Fitch
  8. The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
  9. Crank by Ellen Hopkins
  10. Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
  11. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
  12. Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir by Janice Erlbaum
  13. Cobain by Rolling Stone
  14. Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
  15. Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath
  16. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  17. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  18. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
  19. Junkie by William S. Burroughs

This list will probably be added to at least a couple times before the new year begins, and I'm allowing myself to remove only one book during the year that I can't get through or don't like, but if I do that then I have to fill its gap with another.   And none can be re-read until the others are finished.  Those are the rules.