The reason I haven’t been posting lately is … well … it’s because, apparently, I’m getting dumber. Everything I write — even simple notes and emails — sounds unbelievably obvious and unnecessary to my ears. I chalk it up to some combination of the following:
- The Heat — I live in the South (sort of) and it’s late-July, so I know it’s supposed to be hot, but good lord, I would love to make it through one day without changing my shirt. How am I supposed to write when I could be drinking beer IN THE POOL?
- Home Renovations — We are now entering, like, month SIX in our roof, kitchen, and laundry room-a-go-go, and the smell of drywall dust is getting to me. Actually, it’s not so much the smell as the lung-lining misery of it all. Apparently, sneezing is your body’s way of saying, “I hate you.”
- Performance Anxiety — There’s nothing like sitting down to edit a chapter of your dissertation only to discover that you have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ORIGINAL to say about, oh, about anything, really. Makes a guy want to jump right onto the Internets and prove his stupity to an even larger audience.
- Anomie — In general.
And what’s especially maddening is that I actually have four posts in the works — four posts that have the potential to be pretty darn interesting, each and every one. There’s the post about Joe Pernice, The Smiths, homophobia, and the weeks I spent at an evangelical summer camp. There’s the one about that book-on-tape version of Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (read by Laurie Anderson!) that I picked up for $6 at Books-A-Million and that only confirms my deep, deep love of that strange little book. There’s the one about “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” and how Sufjan Stevens has written a parable that rivals the good Samaritan. And, finally, there’s the second installment of my Great Films thread, wherein I talk about how great the last 50 minutes of Paris, Texas are and about how Some Like It Hot would probably be a lot funnier if it weren’t so depressing.
I may or may not ever get around to writing any of these.