What did you come up with? Time machines? Don’t kid a kidder. To paraphrase everybody’s favorite novelist (j/k) Dickens, this is the worst time that’s ever been. It’s also the best time. Unless you’re a straight white guy, in which case, the Golden Era was all yours. Enjoy Newt Gingrich’s attempts to return you to it, Amerika!
Now if I want to coddle my inbred apocalypticism, I’d rather get in bed with Rimbaud. Or Murakami. Or Joan Didion. Some days—maybe most days—I can’t stand to read anybody who doesn’t think we live in cool beautiful entropy. The world is speeding up and falling apart. No other way I can think of it.
There’s a me that you can have and a me that you can’t have. The me that you can have will tell you things are bad and good, but mostly good, and work is constant, but you know, good, and I’m sorry I didn’t come to that party, and summer was too short, it’s sad. But the other me knows that summer is the longest season, and now that it’s cooled and gone, well thank god, really.
Real journalists comprise a boggling range of humanity. The aspiring/working journalists I know, or have met, or regularly read, are mostly secret loners who have all sorts of agendas, agendas so diverse they can’t possibly be in collusion in that mass way you learn about in first year uni…
I don’t think I could ever live somewhere you can’t bike wildly home after bar hours, in the summertime, with a low probability of harm. Sorry, Manhattan. It’s just the thing that makes me feel most alone in the universe and in the best possible way.
Hugh Hefner, the mainstream Dov Charney, was supposedly s’posed to get married to someone my age (meanwhile, his age is the same as his bank balance) this weekend. Her name was Crystal. Of course it was. So but “Crystal” had a “change of heart,” he tweeted (gross) and instead of starting the rest of her life she went to like a pool party in Las Vegas.
“He romanticized it all out of proportion.” That should be the line on Woody Allen’s tombstone, and not just cause it’s from his best film ever, but because it’s true of everything true he’s done. Every place he’s touched. New York, London, Venice, Barcelona, Paris: everywhere, eternally, Woody plays the tourist.
Yeah, coffee quickens your heart. Cigarettes make it beat faster, harder. So does cocaine and other drugs. So do hot baths and near-death moments, and so does sex and spicy food and seeing your crush suddenly from a short distance and s/he not seeing you.
I’m writing to you from a computer in the lobby of the Ace Hotel, Palm Springs. To my knowledge I am the only person who has used it. Why would you be at a computer when you could be at a pool? A week ago, I’d have had an answer for this, but now I do not.
You’re not old. I mean, demographically speaking, the odds of you reading this and being old(er than 34) are like 1:20. The odds of you thinking you’re old because you can’t stay out past breakfast-time anymore and you learn about new music from Pitchfork are like 20:1.