Uh, yeah...

This is just a filler post. You'll know that if you read it. But I put some ideas in it. And anyway, I think I mention it is so while writing it. As long as it captures something, however ugly and un-brilliantly it might do so, then it was worth it. It's a Monday when I'm actually writing this, although it's dated otherwise, and since it's mad, it gets that tag. I've gotta sleep. Night, folks. (6/21/10, 11:34PM)

I was reading Glamorama that fall and I was trying to figure out how I was going to nail down that Eagle Scout award and it was coming up on the end of October and I had plans to go to a Halloween party, so it was a costume shop that the idea occurred to me that reading this book rearranged your nervous system to make you think in run-on sentences. Now it’s going on two years later and I’m rereading it because of the fiasco that was attempting to get back through all of Bret Easton Ellis’s books before Imperial Bedrooms came out, which stalled in much the same way that it did the first time through, which was putting down American Psycho for about a month and a half, because it’s just that type of book, you just can’t keep reading it, there’s a point where you don’t want to for a while.

This is the only way you can discuss a book like Glamorama, sorry Jonathon Keats, but you have to have Say Hi (to Your Mom) playing and you have to working on borrowed time, because you should be getting to sleep soon, because you’re pretty much a working man for this summer, and there’s some sort of blandness there, a scary ennui that you feel your life’ll turn into, and you don’t want that, but you can’t stop it. I’m not really sure if this is going to make much of a post at the moment, but you know, I somewhat wanted to talk more about Imperial Bedrooms here, but then again I didn’t want to listen to the whole four hours of it when I first bought the audio-book, because it would feel like a waste of money, so I’ve been spacing it out and the effect is that, sure I have less to say about it.

The beginning of the last paragraph is a rift off of a Tao Lin poem called “things you have emailed me,” and there the speaker was talking about Wittgenstein, a name which reminds me, non-sequiturously (not a word, I know) of a tweet by @al29902, or Allen Edwin Butt, the young poet who’s been published already a few times in Poetry, who said at one point, “Diggin’ Zukofsky.” Now as I’ve typed this, I sit here wondering why in fact I made a connection between these two—did it have to do with the awkward names?—could I tell from context that both were writers? There’s no way I’m going to answer that question, there’s no way I’m going to get anywhere with this blog entry, because I have no idea where it’s heading right now; this post is a sail boat and the wind is just taking us along, the synapses, perhaps, blowing through my brain, but maybe that doesn’t make sense, maybe that’s a bad metaphor based on bad science.

I was driving home from work earlier tonight and I had just gone through eight hours of somewhat useless but well-paid labor, and I had Andrew McCarthy reading the Ellis book playing, when all of a sudden, at this exact moment of the day, the sky decides to open and up and emit, in all seriousness, a freaking ocean onto the planet, so I’m fiddling with the windshield wipers and it’s my dad’s car and I’ve rarely driven it in serious rain and this was cats and dogs within like five seconds, so it kinda pisses me off as I’m finagling after a few seconds to combat my now aquarium-like windshield. This is paid off, however, when I get home and can turn the car off and take the keys out of the ignition while still keeping the radio playing, something my 2000 blue C-RV, Manuela, probably can’t do, although I’ve never tried it; this car is called, somewhat facetiously, Freddie, because I asked my dad what he would’ve named it, had he done so, and he said it’d have to be that, perhaps a bit of a spin off of his own fake name which has a Fred in it and happens to be one of the names of the fictional writers that I’ve returned to time and time again in my fiction.

Listening to Imperial Bedrooms, then, in the rainstorm of my life (but I’m exaggerating it, because it felt that bad, but probably wasn’t), I start to think about the irony of it all. The plot of the story is Clay falling for a girl that he knows doesn’t like him back, but is trying to delude himself, and her name is Rain and she’s out of his life at the exact part where I’m sitting in the car waiting on this storm to let up so I can keep a System of a Down burned CD, my iPod, and my clothes moderately dry. Well clearly she’s left you for the moment, I could have said, because she’s fucking messing up my night right here, Clay, and you get what I’m saying, because you’re a writer even if you’re taking the means to tell us you aren’t.

It’s funny, when he’s with Rain, Clay says that all of the plot of the novel is basically put on hold. It’s interesting, because the real world doesn’t work like that and Bret Easton Ellis knows that; I’m finding it difficult to agree with people who keep saying that this one’s more of the same, because it simply isn’t; the idea that Ellis is reaching, about Clay’s reality is something that he doesn’t even breach into in Lunar Park. It’s so different that if you do like what Ellis has written before, I could see you taking issues with this one, but you’ll probably enjoy it; I’m not going to say the converse—that you’ll like it if you don’t like Ellis, that’s probably not true. But this book is asking questions and answering them, mainly, and you get all of these little glimpses that you can use as keys to other books that’ve come before, to this entire universe that he’s built up, and it’s sort of a multiverse now, you ken it? And I’ve not made sense yet in this post, so it’s not the time to start now and if you’ve read this far then you are determined, indeed, and congratulations if you think you understand me completely, because you’re doing almost better than I am, myself.

I wrote a book called You are a little bit cooler than I am. and now I’m listening to an album called “Impeccable Blahs” and the last part of the book is called “Vampires on Campus” and I've realized that Eric Elbogen had created something very similar to my own themes, if not my story, and I’m not sure how I feel about that; is it a good thing to have the same ideas as a clearly talented artist? But you are so afraid of unoriginality. How can you say that? Someone calls out. How can you say that when you’ve been just rambling on, stream of consciousness, based on how you were thinking while originally reading Glamorama and how that feels the same way, somewhat, to how you get when you’re writing a poem, and you think there’s something meaningful there, and I realize that it’s simply me talking to myself and so I stop.