Go dangle your fishhook out in the gutter again
I am downloading the new Grizzly Bear album on a computer with a 50.60 Kbps connection. As you might imagine, it takes an insanely long period of time. I usually download one song per day, and it’s the whole instant gratification that you lose out on in the meanwhile. If the song sucks you actually did just waste that much time, but mostly you appreciate it more. You find something in there that’s worthwhile, to validate the fact that you did not just waste twenty minutes downloading a song, like it’s 1999. This is the whole neo-Luddite stance I’ve taken in relation to my computer. Yeah, I work with one all day and download songs and things, but it’s a compromise. In not paying for the ultra-fast connection, I am in fact skipping out on the insipient ADD and gratification that is part in parcel of a culture that has spun out of control. The future, you might say, is going to be dumb ã. But I have absolved myself, partially, while still only being able to hold marginal conversations with people, spacing out momentarily before rejoining or talking about something else entirely.

Things have gotten out of control in my life. I don’t think it’s quite at the point where I need my friends and family to unsuspectingly appear in my bedroom, in some Leif Garrett-type intervention scenario, but I have taken notice. I woke up this morning with a gigantic phallus drawn in green magic marker on my hand and only a vague recollection of the circumstances which may have led to it being there. And some other random and haphazard events which lend no real congruity to the fact that I woke with a green penis drawn on my hand. But I do remember thinking, late in the night, just before sleep: people, they are the strangest thing, really. And there is no accounting for all of the strangeness and the problems they cause while together. Accompanying this thought was the imagery of sickly molecules coming together and going apart again. I still don’t know if it’s my abundant understanding of these strange people which cause me to be alienated and think thoughts like, I really just should keep to myself and stay locked up in the attic. But I continue to think them anyway, all the while reminding myself that I could have it wrong about someone, something.

More and more now I find myself in some horrible bar with a friend, talking over our pseudo girl situations, and better times. A character in a movie I have recently seen bemoans his fate, and how horribly things turned out, and here I find myself doing the same thing. It’s pretty embarrassing. “Why are all of the people we know such psychos?” I am asked. I don’t really know, I tell him, but I think it might have something to do with the internet.

Last night I happened on a grown woman weeping in a Dunkin’ Donuts at 2:30 am. She was sitting with her face in her hands, and her head drawn to the side. And then I realized, watching as people came and went, that she was crying. Her boyfriend had just broken up with her, I imagined, and had left her at the Lark Street Dunkin’ Donuts to run off with another woman. Or she had just lost a relative or a loved one. Or she is just really broken up over a world in need of repair, where its inhabitants are cracked and drunk and interchangeable. I sat there for a moment, wondering what I would do. I really would have liked to go over and offer her some form of consolation, buy her a doughnut or something, but in the end I opted not to. And so we sat there, and suffered some more. It is a long life, sometimes. And a cruel one. But it does have its redeeming factors. And then the song comes on that I have just downloaded. It was worth the wait. The singer sings: Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up, cheer up. I would like her to hear it. And more than anything, I would like for all of the broken life form of the Lark Street Dunkin’ Donuts to stand up and break out in song, singing in unison in pretend microphone fists. Everything is going to be OK, I am at least partially sure.