On an endless loop in my head for the past 36 hours:
fuck you
and your untouchable face
fuck you for existing in the first place
and who am I
that I should be vying for your touch
and who am I
I bet you can't even tell me that much
Oh, HELLO 17! It's been a while since you've reared your multi-colored gothed out acid freak head. I would say I've missed you, but oh ... I really am kind of enjoying this "not insane" thing I've been working on for the past decade or so.
...
Well, right. Let's rephrase: "not publicly and unabashedly insane." We all have our demons, after all. (Or; it's always funny when it's someone else's guinea pig.)
Demons and Ani Difranco aside, what I wanted to mention briefly was this particular black hole I was plummetted into earlier this evening (this was before making the mistake of watching Constantine on TNT, and thusly unrelated, because I think we all know that's enough to push anyone into a soulsucking vortex of misery and defeat.) Something like 76 years ago, I started reading this little novel called Quicksilver, the first in a series called The Baroque Cycle, by a talented young man named Neal Stephenson. If you are at all familiar with the book, you will have already guessed that when I said "little novel" I really meant "giant cerebral 4000 page headfuck of historical cockamamie interspersed with fucked up accents, a lot of italics, and no small amount of incredibly dense footnotes" -- and I bet you had a giggle.
So, really, it's been very slow going with this book. I honestly think I started reading it at least three apartments ago. It has been there through any number of life-altering circumstances with it's comforting ineffability; because it's fucked, right, but it's not fucked like Finnegan's Wake where you throw the book across the room and try to exorcise it through your wailing tears after reading the first paragrah. It's got a little something that keeps you going back, but maybe after you've taken a couple of weeks to truly absorb those last 10 pages (4 - 6 weeks if those 10 pages included transcripts of live theater, which an ungodly* amount of them do.)
The point, she hastens. The point is that I am dangerously close to the end of this book. I can taste it. A mere 50 pages (could be anywhere from 8 to 24 weeks, though the transcripting has tapered signifigantly in recent chapters) and I'll be done. And I'm sitting there, book in hand, ruminating on this fact with a peculiar mix of sadness and triumph -- mostly triumph -- wondering what my life will be like when I'm free, the places I can go, the people I will meet, the glories the world can finally show me ... when it fucking dawns on me: there are two more books in the series.
TWO. MORE. BOOKS. IN THE SERIES.
Now I know I mentioned up there in the preamble that this was a series, it even had a name. But, like, that was not a fact that sat at the forefront of the old lobes until this evening. I mean, I would say it when asked "Yes, Baroque Cycle, historical, not at all like Snowcrash" but they were just words. I didn't quite grasp the weight of the knowledge that I will be living with the fictional versions of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Fucking Leibniz for what will apparently be THE REST OF MY LIFE.
Said weight is kind of crushing, ether. And there is no "don't read them." To consider the possibility is to not know me one goddamn bit.
My life. Breathe it in.
* suffice to say, even one occurence of live theater transcription would be ungodly -- this takes it up a notch
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