Live in the Time of Cholera

My first thought was to fit a review of Glass Onion into this space this week, but a) it would have been the third straight review in a row, which would accidentally give people the idea that this outlet has some kind of purpose, which would constitute a lie of perception, like a mirage but less about water and more about intentionality, and b) I'm on vacation and I really don't feel like working that hard.

Normally my Thursday writing is pretty baked in to my workaday routine. I've been off for my now-traditional two-week holiday break since the Friday before Christmas, so I'm almost a full week into my annual orgy of introverted hedonism, which looks a lot like YouTube and Coke Zero. I'm completely unfastened from the capitalist cycle of productivity, which is manifesting in exactly the kind of aggro monster anarchy it sounds like: computers only turned on for the benefit of the cat, peanut butter for dinner three out of every five days and my bedtimes, I don't have to tell you, are FUCKING INSANE. I'm middle aged, entirely unsupervised, doing exactly as much damage you would imagine someone would who has no real taste for alcohol or drugs and has little to no disposable income. Several meaningful asterisks, but still, crazy-town up in here.

The result is that this week and next week are likely to be low-effort, writing-wise. I don't even really have a year-end list of best-things to gin up as I've already documented a lot of the stuff I watched and I haven't actually finished reading any books. I'm still technically working on James Joyce's Ulysses, as I have been since around the time the first pandemic lockdown hit. To be fair to myself, I'm more than 400 pages into it, which is a) longer than a lot of books and b) written by a 1920s Irish literary sadist, so really it should count as at least two completed novels. But that's really hard to render into a list format:

1. Some part of Ulysses

2. A different part of Ulysses not inclusive of The End

As far as music goes, Spotify went and did that "Spotify Unwrapped" thing that I expressly and steadfastly did not fucking ask for, and it turns out my favorite new music this year was a bunch of shit from the '90s and some Lucy Dacus. Again, as with the reading part of it, a list at minimum should consist of more than one part.

I suppose I should be concerned with my lack of consumer ambition over the last 12 months, but honestly, I'm not sure whom I'm supposed to have let down by not being into more stuff. And it's not like I haven't been active, intellectually speaking. For example a lot of the last three months has been spent watching online videos by guitar people as I slowly talk myself into spending money I don't really have on a second electric guitar that I unequivocally do not need. I'm not sure how that really dovetails with my declared program of un-consumerism, but I'm an American after all. The only way really available to me stick it to the man all have to be man-approved and sponsored by a reputable credit-card-issuing bank.

Happy New Year, everyone, same as the last one.