more book bloggin'

So, I knocked out Johan Kugelberg's Brad Pitt's Dog (2012) in a day a few weeks ago. Hard to even comment on the actual ideas in this book without touching on the existential panic that it induced in me. I was simultaneously reading Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes (1968) in 20 page chunks every morning before I bundled myself off to work for either 4 or 11 hours, forever looking up Laguna Beach special features DVDs for outstate library patrons (for whom torrenting is inconceivable in theory or execution) or nodding politely to strangers asking me about my name and spelling it back to me. Seventh circle of library hell b/w grin and bear it retail reality. Life in your mid 20s. Grim.

I just finished A Fan's Notes a few days ago. That book is full of lovely long paragraphs about a real asshole. The book's Exley (I'm sure not far of a remove from the real thing, about whom I admittedly know little) is a total piece of shit, but if you (like me) think you are above the bullshit conventions of business, society, the art/literature establishment, etc. and you're finding yourself completely demolished by the notion that you're no longer special or prodigious, you'll cringe and weep and try to weasel your way out of identifying with Ex and you won't be able to. You'll be paralyzed: opt out? buy in? Ex opts out, and his refuge bears disturbing resemblance to my own, were I to choose such a path.  Mom's couch and an elderly spaniel? (Though Skye, my parents' beloved Springer, doesn't have a Roman numeral in her name because we're of the ascendant Jewish middle class, no WASP bs here!) A dangerous novel to read at 24. Scarier still to imagine reading it later in life and finding it this potent.

Many of my friends are choosing to opt out, after trying to be yuppies for a while. I'm aghast at both, but I can't figure it out for myself, so I'm just working two dead end jobs and frittering away my money and time on what? A disjointed record collection and existential panic about being the wrong kind of fan, the wrong kind of punk, a person whose life/jobs/interests are fine and noble in theory but in reality give me nothing? I remember about five years ago I started working at Extreme Noise and buying a lot of records all of a sudden, and I was talking to my friend about how to even begin to prioritize what you want. He said to me, "Get what you can find, because you won't always be able to get this stuff, and what you want is probably always out of your reach."

Five years later I have a lot more stuff, and a lot of fucking cool records, but I know all the sick rares and zine scraps and digital currency of amazing old hc pictures can't make my idea of community appear in front of me. And is it even community or a way to conquer the uncertainty of life, the gaps and skips that we try to ignore by organizing, collecting, cataloging? I don't know, and I'm not smart enough to intellectualize it any further, but what Kugelberg calls "a sentiment much too dark" (below) I want to get tattooed backwards on my fucking forehead to remind myself to chill out on this stuff sometimes.

You will...
Never know everything
Never hear everything
Never own everything
Never remember everything