I'm the Jay Sherman of Blogspot, but for Books

Here are a few things I've read lately and what I think of them. Now give me a goddamn check and publish my shit in The New Yorker or whatever goddamn rag. Fuck you, you know the shit is good. Also, spoilers are probably in there so you can suck on those too.

I read this after the internet demanded that I do so. It was good, but as I posted a long time ago when I read Kobo Abe's Woman in the Dunes, I felt I missed out on a lot because a: I'm not a Japanese man and b: my hazy recollection of the 1980s skewered the narrative. I wouldn't say it was good, because it was meandering and time flowed strangely in the book and I was expecting a story without all the insane occult/mystical shit that happened when he was in the well. Hang on, it was good, but I can't say why. I read it all and didn't think it was a chore, but I did think that it would have been better had Mr. Murakami pared his shit down and didn't go so far afield in the writing. I don't know, I felt like Hemingway reading Stein, but no one's read that book and no one knows what the fuck I'm talking about.

This is the most recent book by Tao Lin and it is awesomely funny and depressing at the same time. He goes all out in showing how awful and boring and lonely and wonderful and shitty the lives of young adults are. I hate myself when I read him, but I also get him too. I want to rip out the internet's eyes and masturbate with them when I read him. I feel him infecting my brain with his deadpan delivery and shitty lives of his characters. I have the feeling that Tao is showing us his life in all its disgusting ennui and that this showing forces us to take our own shittiness into account. He shows us why using the internet is stupid, blogs are worthless, the self is a stupid and trite construct that crashes blindly on the breakwater of technology but only because these things are just as pointless as all the other shit that we have to do to grind through another day. Going to the store after your eight hour job is equivalent to spending hours on chat with a fat self mutilator that sometimes gives you head. If you don't want to constantly kill yourself, you're not paying hard enough attention.


The internet also raved about Siddhartha, but I didn't. It was well written and informative, but only if you're a total noob to ideas laid out by the Buddha. I did however like the idea of a protagonist who eschews everything in order to find shit out for himself, even though Siddhartha seemed like kind of a douche. Like I could have saved him a lot of time and searching just by punching him and telling him he's not special and nothing matters.


This was pretty awesome at excoriating of the soullessness of bureaucracy and the stupidity and also the humanity of the barely cognizant workers upon whom this nation is built. It's funny as fuck too. I've heard tell that Bukowski is considered this rampant misogynist, but that wasn't my impression. Also, suck on it.


Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.

The word terrible looks funny in a block like that. Next up, I should have finished James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Updike's rabbit, run, and Gabriel Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and maybe some other awful that gets sandwiched in there.

Aaron Rodgers is the Quarterback That Brett Favre Wishes He Could Have Been

Usually I'm not this big of a fanboy, but goddamn Aaron Rodgers is goddamn awesome.

I mean, he wasn't so great today, and if it weren't for the insanely badass interception returned for a touchdown by a three hundred pound plus wall of meat then the Packers probably wouldn't have the NFC champ trophy but still.

Packers gonna win that Superbowl.

Team Sleep is So Awesome and People in Arizona are Fucking Dead and Someone is at Fault

Going to post this without comment other than I found this using Google Images and the search words: Tuscon suspect.

See, I was going to post a picture of the crazy Arizona guy who shot up that group at the town hall thing and post the picture next to Travis Bickle and maybe make some kind of statement about life imitating art. That didn't happen though, obviously, so maybe let's just have some throw away one liners or stories or something. Fucking goddamn, I don't know.

I know. Here's a link. The parts of the internet where I stay are godless warrens of smut, full of the worst kind of bestiality, degradation, and all manner of bodily fluids, and it's kind of weird to me to visit a place that talks about god and hell as if they're real. I mean, the guy even capitalizes the nouns, so you know he's serious. It reminds me of my mother, of whom I've posted before, and how she lived in fear of a future where religious (i.e., Protestant Christian) repression in the United States would become the norm. Absurd, or maybe not. I don't even fucking know.

Check it. There's all kinds of liberal or progressive or what the fuck ever outrage over this shooting in Arizona. They're mostly blaming crazy Republican rhetoric for inciting conservatives to take "Second Amendment cures" for the socialistic cancer that is currently festering at the edges of flyover country. Let's face it though. America's always been full of crazy motherfuckers with guns who don't give a shit and will take any justification to start shooting at things. Whoo! Does anyone remember anything about American history? (Please forgive all the Wikipedia links. They're just too convenient and I know you didn't read them anyway. No one ever reads the links. Ever.) Recruit don't know.

There's something so exquisitely sad about a winter night like tonight. Maybe it's the lack of daylight, but it's January and February nights where the winds come high and fast down onto the valley floor that fill you up with the languishing melancholy of your shitty existence. There isn't enough whiskey in the world to wash it away. Known unknowns.

I'm 29 years old and I've never lived a day in my life. Fuck this.