I am proud to report that both John McCain and Barack Obama have conceded the election to me. We fought a hard campaign, but I obviously fought a lot harder and received much more love an many more votes. As I see you all before me tonight, all of you who wrote my name in on your ballots and sent me lots of campaign money that I spent on cream puff pastries from the Zia Diner, pumpkins from McCall's patch, owl pendants, Dale Cooper trading cards, Grant Morrison comic books and Bob Dylan CDs, I feel a great sense of honor and joy. For the next four years, I will be proud to sleep all day while my excellent vice presidential choice, David Duchovny, makes all the decisions. Truly, the owls are not what they seem. My fellow Owls and I will lead this country out of its lack of cultural prominence, and we will once more fight off the ghosts and make the night safe for donuts. The Owl Party, though, is not just about partying. We are also about Batman, those delicious peanut butter cups from Trader Joe's, reviving David Foster Wallace, and producing more and better cats. Tonight, we are all Democrats, we are all Republicans, and we all voted for me for president. I'm pretty sleepy now, so I'll let Mr. Duchovny take over from here.

Back in September, either Scott or Anne heard about a Mountain Goats concert scheduled for Halloween night. John Darnielle and co. were coming through the southwest like a wagon train on amphetamines, parking in Arizona on October 29th and then careening right over New Mexico to Lubbock, Texas for Halloween. Scott wrote a polite message to the mild-mannered, wild-eyed singer, asking him to consider stopping here in order to relieve our high desert misery. He got no reply, which meant we were going to Lubbock.

Life moves slowly here. The last thing I remember is walking down to St. Michael's High School on a warm, drizzly night to see a fireworks display with horrid, beer-sipping, pickup truck-kicking musical accompaniment. Then I think I went to sleep for four months and woke up last Friday to find that someone had placed me in the driver's seat of Hoffman and I was speeding down Highway 40, headed east, a Monster energy drink in my cup holder, shuffling keyboard rock on the stereo. Morrissey was in the passenger seat, and Delirium of the Endless was doing something with scissors in the back. I looked a little closer and saw that it was Scott with a pompadour haircut and an oversized button-down shirt, and Anne with a purple-dyed wig on one side of her head. Then I set my mind to remembering, which is something it does very poorly and only once a season, and realized that I hadn't been asleep, and then I remembered the contents of the first paragraph of this blog.

What is a Lubbock, you might ask? I knew the answer after a few more hours of driving. It turns out that it's a flat bit of earth on the western edge of Texas, where somebody decided to plant a bunch of store fronts from the 1950s, turn on some neon lights, name the streets with letters of the alphabet, and sprout a few Texas hipsters who aspire to someday be from Austin. On Avenue H, which had been subtitled Buddy Holly Avenue, there's an art gallery with a performance space attached, and at 11:30 p.m. on Halloween, John Darnielle jumped out from the garage door that opened onto the stage, glanced at the crowd, saw Scott-as-Morrissey in the front row, and walked over pointing at him and grinning madly. Then he grabbed the microphone, glanced at his bassist, Peter, and started to mouth along to The Four Seasons' "Oh What A Night".

I've only seen the band once before, as described in the first post on this blog, in fact. There was no drummer last time, and Peter only joined him for a few songs. This time nearly everything was with accompaniment, and in the middle they were joined by Kaki King, the opening act. Kaki is an angry-looking, very young guitar virtuoso, able to play different melodies with each hand, one tapping notes on the neck and the other finger-picking, while also thumping a beat with her palm. When she was on with her own band, she seemed to take delight in telling the audience that she'd been up all night drinking, that we weren't fucking rowdy enough, that the people to the right who were briefly moshing were showing us up on the left, that she was contractually obligated to play this next song every night for the rest of her life, "so you can all touch yourselves now, or someone else." The song she then played is apparently her most famous, just her on guitar making a danceable, complex, memorable little rhythm, fingers moving at a hundred miles per hour. It was pleasantly rousing, and the crowd got into it, and she appeared to resent the fact that she'd written something people liked.

So I didn't like her, but John sure seemed to. When she joined him in the middle of his set, he described his embarrassment when she sent him a demo, because he was her fan and he didn't think he was good enough to play with her. "So I wrote lyrics from the perspective of a stalker," he said, and then broke into the song they'd been strumming as he spoke; his lyrics and singing once again showed that he's a master songwriter, while she's (at least at this point) a snivelling poser.

The next song John introduced by saying, "This wasn't on the set list tonight, but someone in the audience told us it should have been." Familiar chords crashed around the room, and then, "Why do you come here? And why-huh-hiii-huh-hiiii-huh-hiiiiii . . . why do you hang around?" While he sang, he made a few airy gestures with his hands, and then he bent toward the audience to grasp people while he sang. Scott had come equipped with a bush-like bunch of flowers to wave, and halfway through the song he threw them on stage. John picked them up and did the Morrissey dance right, then walked over to Scott and took him by the hand, and for half a minute they sang to each other, "You had to sneak into my room, 'just' to read my diary. 'It was just to see, just to see' (All the things you knew I'd written about you...) Oh, so many illustrations, oh, but I'm so very sickened, oh, I am so sickened now." Then John took off his glasses and handed them to Scott, trading him for the pair of black-rimmed Morrissey glasses Scott had on.

Oh, what a night indeed, dear dwindling number of readers. It ended at the Lubbock Denny's where a Johnny sophomore who had told Anne that we could crash on his floor (and then revoked the offer the night before) held court before a group of local admirers. He waxed on lovingly to his high school friends, embellishing the difficulty of the St. John's program, oh, how very hard and impossible it is! Anne even remembers him calling Johnnies the Navy SEALS of the intellectual realm. There were about twenty people at the table, one of them a Freshman who had come along for the show but had been snubbed by a guy she was hoping to hang out with, and now she wanted to go home. Luckily, so did we, so we offered her the extra seat in our car, then turned around and left the arid plains of Lubbock for the juniper spotted wonderland of New Mexico at night.

It is the time of year when coats accompany everyone like second skins, making friends and acquaintances immediately identifiable even from a distance when outside, remaining behind as a reminder of their presence when they get up to go to the bathroom or find a book. They add so much to people's personalities that they are like character in physical form. I can almost imagine that if I wore another person's coat for a while, I would eventually become that person. Forget shoes, walk a mile in someone else's coat. Put on James Dean's jacket and lean against a brick wall with a cigarette and soon enough you'll be slightly mournful and act recklessly. Take Lincoln's jacket and stand at a lectern and surely great eloquence will flow from your lips.

I'm surprised there isn't some ritual involving the resurrection of the dead by means of their coat. Well, there's that scene in Beetlejuice I guess. I can't help but think there's more of a person in his or her coat than in any other object they keep with them. The question then arises, does the personality come from the coat or does the coat pick it up over time, like a cat rolling around on concrete? Does the coat call out to its future wearer from the clothing rack? Does a tailor possess the creative power of a deity?

A coat resting on the back of a chair, when its wearer is somewhere else, transforms a whole room into a warehouse for souls. It sits inert, waiting for the mind that it completes to return. I almost expect that its wearer will sprout from beneath it, arms filling out sleeves, and walk away. At any moment, the coat itself might just rise into mid-air and start cooking dinner or watching television.

My last day at work, and one of the treasurers I work with just left me a message and said "so if you can holler back at me, I'll be here this morning."

A student just came up to the circulation desk holding an open book. "Excuse me," he said, "I have a question. Why does it have errors?"

I took the book from him and glanced down at the page. "What do you mean?"

"Like the year, punctuation . . . is it just typos?"

"Yeah," I said, and handed the book back to him.

"Okay, thank you," he said, and placed the book in the return cart.

October

Fall: the plants bulge with ripeness, sagging under their own weight, ready to die. The sunlight is diffuse and cold but also comforting, like the light from a fish tank when you're the only one left awake in the house; it has all the clemency that is missing from the merciless sunlight in mid spring. The ground sags and crumbles under each step, the moist remains of decaying leaves, spilled apple cider, acorns that didn't take root. The air is the breath of ghosts, the air drifts out of brick fireplaces and crawls out from underneath porches, unfurls out of old oak chests and billows out of the creases of long-unused wool blankets. The air is what the world will feel like when it finally stops running, chill and calm.

It rained yesterday, water showering down from the grey sky that was not mournful but mischievous. It splashed against the window and trickled down in little rivers, and pattered across the roof like all the steps ever taken there by cats that once were, like fingertips fluttering across a piano's keys at midnight. Such a relief after the onslaught of summer, which made a very great campaign this year indeed. Summer conquered all that came before its wrathful eyes, and hoarded its spoils in a cave by the seaside. It settled there to drink and eat continuously, never sated, and thus engorged its body with the stolen goods. Now it lies prone and rotting, overthrown by its own greed. The rain crept over to laugh at it softly.

Now night comes on like a festival, decking the sky with its banners of stars, making streamers out of the rustling leaves and tent flaps out of the shimmering horizon. Crickets spring about as jesters with fiddles, and every uncertain step in darkness is a roaring carnival ride. The moon is the bard of the world and it knows every song that ever was, because they were all written for the moon. Cats creep through the darkness, preying on unsuspecting revellers who don't keep a close enough eye on their wallets. The cotton candy air is sweet and pulls off in soft chunks, then melts on your tongue. Sometimes if you stand outside long enough until the wee hours of the morning, you can almost see the workmen come along and take it all down.

"The flowers cool from the on-going fires, the beginning-death of nature, into another warmth of the confession of the sin of picking, a warmth that is insularand yet is a secret bondage with the human hand, the ally of the blooming--the fulfillment--the entelechia of the flower. The counter of the plucking is the arranging, the arranging that takes place (wonderful phrase, takes place!) between streaming fingers. Rather than arranging, could we say weaving? The flowers, now having found each other again in the vase, can we see the basket?"

-From a 1980 Friday night lecture by Thomas Harris entitled "Work"

Thomas Harris sure was most exceptionally crazy. This is the second essay of his I've looked at here at the library, and neither one at any point even began to make sense. Going to his lectures must have been like having someone read Finnegan's Wake without even knowing English.

I was sitting on my back porch with Anne late on Saturday night after watching a movie with some friends when I heard a strange shout, and then Scott opened the door and told us that David Foster Wallace had hanged himself. The next several minutes were taken up by silence. The night felt split open, an unmistakable mark had just been made. I knew I would remember this moment, possibly for the rest of my life. This was the first time I had heard of the death of a famous person that hit me on a personal level, made me feel like something irrevocable had been lost.

At first I thought it was just the unexpectedness, the fact that Wallace wasn't on my list of people whose death I had to watch out for, because he was so young. I actually have a short list of people I check periodically just to make sure they're alive, people whose absence would make the world a different place: Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Philip Roth. They're all around the age of my grandparents, and their loss would have similar significance for me as those first and primal family members. They are forces in my life, nearly aspects of my personality. They're the people who I most often look to and think of as paradigms of writerly greatness, personalities I might aspire to develop, models for myself if I took writing more seriously. I don't think I realized it before Saturday, but it turns out that Wallace was one of those too.

I first encountered Wallace in 2003, when Anne recommended him to me as one of the few writers she would call good. I read Infinite Jest first, over the course of a few weeks, and I think some part of me is still reading that book, still taking it in. Here was a modern writer who, in contradistinction to nearly everybody else, seemed to understand what it meant to write a masterpiece, and maybe had done so. A writer who took the vocation of novel writing seriously enough that he made something that was wholly his own, and yet spoke to people of my generation saying things we all knew but hadn't yet realized.

Later, I read Girl With Curious Hair and Supposedly Fun Things, and I saw that his range was even greater than I thought. He was a literary experimenter, an insightful cultural critic, a memoirist, a scholar. Moreover, his life was not so dissimilar from mine. I could identify with him in ways that I couldn't with other great writers like Dostoevsky or Faulkner, because the steps he took in learning to write were steps taken in a culture I recognized. In his youth he was smitten with the works of postmodern writers of the sixties and seventies, and then when he did an MFA program he realized that the goal wasn't imitation but rather development of the same ideas for one's self.

For years, then, I've thought of Wallace every so often when scanning the recent past for new, living writers who I wholly respect. They're not very easy to find. His work was leagues above, say, Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer, because he just had a bigger view of the world, more insight into the culture, a better ability to express himself. This didn't result in my reading everything he wrote (although I've read a lot of it), but that was mainly because I thought there was time. I thought he'd be around for a long while yet, and that he'd produce a lot more work. When I learned that he taught a writing course, even though it was in Phoenix I thought that if I decided to do an MFA myself, I'd want to do it with him. I didn't know if that was possible, because I don't have the freedom to do an MFA right now, but it was in the back of my mind as a possibility. Even if I couldn't take a writing program with him, I would have liked to meet him, see him speak, get something signed.

Now that all that potential is gone, now that he is gone, I realize that for me, he represented something no other writer has: he was the best I've seen at expressing the hidden parts of our personality, the things that we feel as separations from other people and from popular culture, the thoughts that we can't share, the aspects of ourselves that seem inexpressible in words. These are the things he most often wrote about, things that seemingly preoccupied him. He described a feeling that I think is widespread in my generation that the world we're inheriting was not made for us, is not how we'd want it, but that perhaps we're powerless to change it. He was a champion of the hidden personality that can only be shared with close friends, and of the even more hidden depths that we can't share with anyone, the fear that deep down we ourselves don't know who we are and aren't sure we want to be anyone.

So today I'm feeling grief, having lost one of my champions, a man who made the world more understandable, a place that felt more desirable to live in. Mixed with that is a gratefulness that he wrote what he did. And mingled with that is a kind of despair, because if in the end Wallace couldn't find a way to live with the world as it was, to live with himself as he was, then what chance do I have?

Night has descended here at the library, the windows now might as well have thick sheets hung over them, and night is pretty close to what I'm feeling, too. I've come up for a one-year performance evaluation at NEA, and I should have seen it coming. I "need improvement" nearly all down the line. No surprise, as I spend most of my days reading blogs or news and, every so often, clenching my fist with rage at having to answer the phone.

The things that my evaluation list me as needing improvement in are things that I just don't want to be good at: having a tidy work area, having a polite and courteous voice when I answer the phone, asking for more work when I'm not busy, making sure the doors around the building are locked every night. Fuck it!

I understand why they want a tidy work area, since I'm at the front desk. I'll try to improve it, even, but I would rather it be a non-issue.

On the phone, I listen at length to everyone who calls and I try to help everybody as best I can. If the callers actually take the time and energy to think that my voice isn't warm enough and then tell this to my supervisor, though, they can stick live alligators up their ass.

As for asking for more work, well, that just strikes me as perverse.

Anyway, I don't want to get fired at the end of the month, so I'm going to try to improve. I was already planning to leave around year's end, though, and this only improves the chances that I'll actually take the necessary steps. It's even kind of useful to receive such an evaluation, because at the heart of the matter is the fact that I took a job with responsibilities that I didn't care for, and then I didn't live up to those responsibilities. I guess even at age 25 I still need other people to drive home the point that it shows.

I like this piece well enough, but I'm linking to it because the comments are really spectacular. The piece is by Steven A. Smith, the editor of The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington. It looks like he wrote it around 10 pm, and who knows what brought it out. He wrote it as a paen to "newspapermen," a term which he obviously has a lot of affection for and which he uses to define himself. Personally I find the word a little ridiculous; it makes me think of mute members of a cult who creep around at night writing lines of copy all over the sidewalks and tree trunks and car doors, trying to communicate their weird creed to confused suburbanites. Or maybe they roll up feathers and mud and string and other childlike objects into newspapers to make a burnt offering on their converted-printing-press alter to William Randolph Hearst. Or moleman creatures who live in newspaper-encrusted cave lairs that they've patched together with their own spit, hiding out in the crawl space under your house or in the abanadoned parking lot where a factory burned down.

It means something different to him, something I find a little uncomfortable:

"A newspaperman wore black slacks, a bit worn. A short-sleeved white shirt and a thin black necktie. A newspaperman owned one pair of black wingtips for his entire career.

"A newspaperman had nicknames, raunchy, rude and unashamedly affectionate nicknames, for all of the linotype operators in the basement. A newspaperman reveled in the composing room heat, the smells of melted lead and oily black ink."

The writing's hammy, but engaging, with the rhythem of a pulp detective novel. And the content . . . isn't it just plain weird? As one commenter pointed out, "This seems to offer the view that the figure of the public truthseeker in the USian social spectacle modeled himself on figures from a bygone, noir-ish subgenre of fiction. Worth a bit of reflection. What's being protected, what's being pretended, and why?"

There is one paragraph, though, that I find myself drawn to, even though I never subscribed to a local newspaper: "No instrument will ever serve the public interest so relentlessly as the daily newspaper. New media will successfully distribute data and information. 'Communities of interest' will develop around niche products. And while print newspapers will survive to serve a small, elite audience, they never again will serve the larger geographic communities that gave them life and purpose. Democracy will have to find a new public square."

I tend to believe that newspapers could in fact serve the public interest really well--better than anything else--even though my main source of reference is the skimpy, sad, broken little things we now call local papers. I find something appealing about the model of a newspaper: a single place for local [and perhaps also national and international] news, community notices, classified ads, opinions, writeups about concerts or festivals or movies, profiles of artists and community figures, and all of it subsidizing investigations of local politicians and businesses. If more people in a community read the local paper, no doubt it would serve to tie people together, provide a common source of information that they could discuss and a common place where they could communicate with others in their vicinity who they otherwise wouldn't meet. I don't know if this is merely an idealized picture of the local paper, but I think even the ones at St. John's were close to being capable of carrying out this function of tying a community together around words and pictures, and if those two-bit operations could sometimes achieve it, surely a bigger and more professional entity would be able to.

Really, what could replace such a thing?

A recent Democracy Now! segment featured an excellent discussion of the fall of daily newspapers. The first half of the discussion was about new business models that don't rely on advertisements, perhaps sponsered by grants or public funds. There weren't many details, but I found the discussion interesting. It would probably be good if media conglomerates start selling off their holdings, and perhaps those fired journalists and editors will start their own, less compromised projects.

Near the end came a discussion about the difference between newspapers and the internet, and why the internet cannot replace print. "The average reader of the paper copy of the New York Times spends forty-five minutes reading the paper. The average viewer of the New York Times website spends about seven minutes." That was Chris Hedges, senior fellow at the Nation Institute and a former correspondent for the New York Times.

And thenLinda Jue, director of New Voices in Independent Journalism: "... what I’m slowly coming around to is understanding that, yes, the internet does not—is not a good medium for delivering long-form, in-depth reporting. And I don’t think that we should try to, you know, plug a square peg into a round hole that way. But I think that, realistically, we have to look at ways to generate attention, to use the internet to drive attention to longer-form reporting that can be found elsewhere, including print."

The whole discussion took the issues a little further than I've seen it anywhere else, and I've been looking at the issue pretty closely for months now.

What would I be doing if I wasn't at work right now? I don't even know any more. Periodically it occurs to me how strange it is that I'm "at work", doing nothing. It strikes me differently each time. Today, I realize how totally it affects my life, how I can't say what would be different if I didn't have to work. Would I have greater ambitions? Would I be content to sleep until early afternoon, and then read the newspaper or novels, like I was during summers and on my year off, before I graduated from college?

And what if I not only didn't have to work, but also had enough money to live anywhere I chose, and do anything I wanted? Where would I be? Hell, what would I be wearing?

That's not quite my concern, though, I realize. I guess I should be asking, what do I want to be doing? I still don't know, if it doesn't involve school or idleness. I don't necessarily want to be idle, but it's out of a moral conception of idleness. Generally, it seems okay to me to do nothing but laze about and read, hang out with frends, play music, make sprawling lists of movies I'd like to watch. Sometimes, I feel like doing more, and usually for me that means writing. Other times, I feel like I should want to do more, and that usually doesn't lead to anything other than feeling bad about myself for a while.

These issues can't help but present themselves through the lens of living in a capitalist society. I have no idea of the way I'd be thinking about them if I wasn't raised in late-20th century America; this was inherent in the way I first presented the question, "what would I be doing right now if I wasn't at work." The only reason I'm asking this question is because I'm in a society where people sign over portions of their time in order to make money. Perhaps this is better than a society where I would have to work all day, and work in a less abstract way than currently. Right now the only "work" I'm doing is being restricted to this particular place right now, answering the phone every so often, occasionally doing something for my boss.

If I had never been in a position to need a job in the first place, what would I be doing? I would not be the person I am. Well, if I suddenly learned that I'd receive my salary all year long without having any responsibilities whatsover, what then? I still don't know who I am, I guess. Do my readers know who they are?

I'm starting work at the library again, starting today. I came in at 10 a.m. or, well, actually more like 10:02. There was a light drizzle, and the radio spoke of New Mexico getting precipitation from Hurricane Dolly in Texas. The sky was and still is clear and white, like a gigantic projector screen with a blank slide.

I parked in Security's parking space in front of the library (ha ha), because all the other spots were taken. Come to think of it, I should check if another spot's cleared up by now so I can move my car to safety. I have been given a temporary parking permit instead of a staff sticker, because the Human Resources office decided that the positions they've incorrectly labeled "temporary" are the employment equivalent of flight risks, and god forbid they should take a job just to get a staff sticker.

So I parked and jogged inside, ready with my key to let in the summer worker, Charlotte. To my surprise, the doors were already unlocked. Jennifer had opened the library early for a meeting of the Board of Prison Guards and Dubliners. So early that the sun was just a hope. She did this so that the prancing morons (currently occupied in making the library as loud as possible, with a few high achievers reaching the decibel levels of an airplane cockpit) could be fed their special breakfasts with their special dribble bibs. Did I mention that I hate these people? I wonder if the reason they're being so loud is because they actually don't recognize the shelves and studying people as a library. Perhaps they think it's an elegant set that the college prepared for their amusement, so that they would have the little thrill of schmoozing at the top of their lungs in an authentic, Grade A Academic Setting.

Anyway, Jennifer was waiting behind the desk, all the lights were on, the computers were active, and all the library was already humming. She introduced me to a project I could do to start out, and then she went home to take a nap.

I logged on to my library desktop for the first time in a year, and opened my email just to see if I had any messages from Laura. I found that IT had simply never closed my email account. I had messages dating back to last October, when I left Switchboard. The system had even saved three messages that I'd never deleted from 2007.

So I scrolled down to the bottom, the earliest emails in the box, which was a little like an archaeological dig. I uncovered all the meaningless little notes that the St. John's offices had sent to each other to let themselves know that time was passing (reminders about birthdays, tips for winter car maintenance, a message about ergonomic work stations). I picked away at the dirt covering each weekly emailed Ephemera, the college newsletter. I marveled at Mr. Pesic's ancient purple prose describing his concerts and lectures of days gone by. As I went through, deleting a page's worth of messages each time after making sure there wasn't anything important in them, I found one of the big things I'd been missing since I left here: tradition. In those trivial emails I rediscovered the jovial, lumbering form of St. John's traditions. I remembered how charming it was to be forever exchanging one season for another, one week for another, one day for another, and to pass from newly arrived freshmen to cider in the coffee shop, from lit fireplaces over winter break to the self-aware somberness of senior writing period, from students lounging outside as the days started getting longer again to the riotous stupidity of the party season; and through it all, at least in my own mind, to be fixed on the unchanging project I thought I took up when I first signed the roster, the project of self-improvement through study of great works. Perhaps I never really had that as a goal in the first place, but if it was a delusion, at least it was a cheery delusion. Just being here, I feel better than I have in a long time in the grey world of office work, where I had nothing to look forward to, no stimulus, no people all around me having new ideas, no challenge, and no people sharing my cheery delusion.

Now here I am again, the roar of the fiends in business suits has finally subsided, and in front of me is a list of subject headings that the Library of Congress has declared canceled, with an accompanying list of their replacements. I have a lot of fine nonsense to get to in the endless renewal of the library's minutiae. It's time to get to work.

"'From what rich soil does creativity bloom?' OK, I know that one. Self-hatred and a creepy hunger for approval." Bing! That was from an interview with a guy named Tom Peyer, who writes comic books and also humor pieces for Slate and the New York Times, and blogs.

And yes, that's probably the best description of why I want to write that I've ever seen. Weird, isn't it? But yes, for some reason I have a huge respect for good writers, and it looks from my cramped perspective as though writers must necessarily have overcome something, have conquered themselves. All creative people, really. They're in touch with themselves and the world, and they are able to craft something in whatever medium they use and put it forward as a new creation, and oh, how sublime! Really, that's how it seems to me.

And if I could finish things I write, I'd be able to give something that feels like a piece of me and have people's comments on it, hopefully approving comments, and perhaps people would respect me and be in awe of me the way I currently am of writers.

But of course I don't actually have these insights, and haven't made anything that I can show to people for my creepy need for validation. Better make them up! And that's where creativity comes from.

I'm just amazed by this quotation Tom Peyer slung off at the end of an interview. I've never seen this idea put so well and succinctly.

The sky looks like I've never seen it before: deep gray descending through a scale to bright white on the horizon. Rain is pouring down in a density that is rare for this part of the country. We've been getting rain just about every day, toward evening. I didn't pay enough attention last year to know when it fell then, but it's normal for it to rain here every day for an hour or two during the summer, mostly July and August. There's some nice thunder every so often. I feel a little nostalgic for Maryland when it's raining. I would often sit in the screened-in porch during a rainstorm on a hot and humid night, the wood of the porch chair swollen and damp on my hands, taking in the smell of the wet world, the sound of beaded rain endlessly tapping on the roof, my heart always picking up speed when the sound of the rain gained a mysterious intensity for a half a second before dropping back to its normal level, as though it was trying to punch a hole through to me. I don't know if it's the wind or just a randomly high water density in the rain clouds just above the roof that causes that sudden increase, but it still gets my heart going now.

Below the sound of the roof I hear a steady rushing sound, like a waterfall, of what I guess is rain pouring onto the ground beneath the gutters. It makes me think of billowing foam spray when a wave hits the shore. It's a hypnotic sound. When I focus on it, my eyes pan slowly toward the edge of my head, and I feel a little dizzy. And above it is the rapping on the roof.

We get flash floods here. Maybe one of these days it will lift me up to a different state of mind.

I had an idea last night, after watching The Happening for the second time: I'd like to create a metric that I could use to measure the badness of bad movies, so that I could not only figure out what the worst major-studio movies are, but also say in what way they're bad. At the very least, my metric would include acting, dialogue, story conception, story execution, and suspension of disbelief. Each of these categories seem like they could also be broken down further; for example, acting can be bad because there's no sense of a mind in the character, because emotions are poorly expressed, because a particular actor doesn't suit a character, etc. Dialogue can be overly dramatic, or can overstate the obvious, can fail to distinguish between characters, etc.

I'm not a student of films, and I don't have an abundent interest in discussing them (which is why I'll probably never do anything with this), but the idea came to me, as I said, after watching The Happening for the second time last night. Anne and I went to see it on Friday, after I saw that the movie had at that point earned a 12% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and that even the positive reviews said things like, "this is not as unmitigated a disaster as Shyamalan's last movie, Lady in the Water" (and frankly I'm surprised that it's possible to get worse than The Happening, so now I want to see it that one too) and "neither great nor a total waste of time and money." (It's also not excellent, good, decent, or tolerable. It's just not a total waste of time and money. By the way, I disagree.) Oh hey, it's now up to 19% positive, woot!

So knowing fully what we were getting into, Anne and I went to see the matinee showing a week after the movie opened. I don't have a television, and I don't read articles on culture, so I was barely aware that this movie existed. I think I'd seen posters in the theater. I'd tired to skip the bits of plot summary in the reviews that I read, but I hadn't really managed because I already knew what the movie was about. So we sat through the opening credits, which played over a rapid shot of clouds as mournful violin music played. The opening scene: Central Park, jogger with dog, densely packed athletic people running very close to one another. Then we saw two women on a park bench reading what appeared to be two hardcover copies of the same book, and the first line of dialogue in unloaded: "Where am I again?" At first the viewer thinks she's asking where she is physically, but then the other woman explains, "You're at the part where [scene from a spy thriller novel]." "Oh."

I'll begin by noting that what these two characters just did is ridiculous. Never in my life have I seen someone forget where they are in a book, ask someone else, and get an answer. First, why would the asker think that the other person knows? Second, why would the other person know? Was she looking over her friend's shoulder while continuing to read herself? Third, this exchange doesn't make any more sense in retrospect; once I saw the rest of the movie, this scene is still offensively bad: even though we soon see that people who are affected by the happening of the movie's title sometimes engage in disorderly speech, these first lines of dialogue still don't make any sense, because the first speaker, when told where she was in the book, said "Oh," which indicates that she wasn't being affected, she was actually asking the extremely improbable question.

Now I'll move on to the acting: the woman who asks where she is in the book she's reading has an altogether innapropraite dreamy tone of voice. She sounds more like she's feigning ignorance to pull one over on her friend, as though she can reliably expect her to belive that she doesn't know where she is in the book. The scene would make a lot more sense if she then laughed and said, "You really fall for it every time, don't you!" Indeed, she spoke with a big, dumb smile on her face, which apparently wasn't feigned innocence; my only other interpretation was that she's retarted and also autistic, and thus unable to properly express emotions with her face, and her sister has taken her to the park to get her outdoors. But if that were the case, wouldn't her sister be reading to her? No, the scene really appears to be intended as straight-forward, exactly what it is.

"You can do both: you can make it meaningful on a personal level. Also, enchant the world with the writing. I do both." -M. Night Shyamalan

Now, I would assume that Shyamalan put a lot of work into this first dialogue exchange, seeing as he's a writer director with pretensions to Hitchcock, and it's the introduction to his themes and concept. Why did he write these lines? Was he indicating that we the viewers ought to ask where we are in this world, or ought to think metaphorically about where the characters are? Was he setting the audience on edge, so that the didn't interpret everything to be the way it first appears? Was he riffing off of Hamlet's "Who's there?" If any of these were the case, then he should have made a movie that followed up on these ideas, but he didn't. He made a meaningless piece of trash.

As the movie went on, I very quickly felt a sense of awe while watching it. It failed on so many levels that it could be used in film school as an example of bad direction, bad acting, bad script writing, bad premise, bad execution. It truly felt like I was watching something so awful that it was significant, a straightforward offering that was so devoid of merit that people should take note. I was watching a happening, all right. I was watching what ought to be a career-ender for everyone involved. The studio that produced this movie should have reason to question the purpose of their lives, if this was the culmination of a year of their time. Everybody who sees it should feel a little more free, because they know that if they were to produce a movie of their own, it couldn't possibly be this bad.

Let's suppose there's a Ministry of Complaints where people can go to declare what they aren't happy with and would like redressed. I've been drinking a lot of coffee and I took tomorrow off work to make a four day weekend, so actually I'm feeling pretty good right now, but generally if I was called to the Ministry (perhaps by a telepathigram sent directly to my consciousness, "Dear Mr. Green, please report to the Ministry of Complaints to unload your grievances"), I would come in and sit down in their fancy padded wooden chair, look into the eyes of the universal entity who was serving in the Ministry that day, and say, "I don't feel like this is the right life for me."

The entity would clear its throat and say, "How do you mean? You wish to be another person, or to live in another time period?"

"No, not like that. This existence, it isn't pleasing to me. Why am I trapped in a forward-moving timeline on a three-dimensional physical plane, bound by gravity, forced to breath air, pump blood, eat and sleep in order to live? Why do I have a body? Why is it loosing its hair? I don't like that. Why do I not know what to do with my time, and why is it that when I think I know what I want to do, I don't do it?"

"That is quite a complaint, sir," the entity would say. "Are you sure you wouldn't be satisfied if we simply issued you another human identity? You could have another body made to your specifications, and we could place you in any situation you wanted. You could have whatever kind of family you wished, live wherever and whenever you wished, possess whatever talents and abilities you choose. We could provide you with a written profile of this new person, which you could edit to your specifications, and then we could form this new life for you to inhabit. Would that suffice?"

"I think I could come around to that, but couldn't you do anything about the universe? Couldn't I, say, not exist for a certain period of time, and then pick it back up again later? Or, how about I can pick a nighttime dream that I'm having and make that my actual life?"

"These requests are outside the boundaries of our power. We control existence, but it is still this existence. However, there are many variations available to you within the world that you already know. Would you be able to content yourself with this sort of change?"

If I decided that I would like a new life, I would then be sent to the Ministry of Redress where, if I had done enough good to earn a replacement life, I could work with the Redress entity assigned to me and design my new self. I could choose to live in a big city and have enough money to use it as my playground. I could choose to be able to play saxophone as well as John Coltrane. I could even choose to be John Coltrane, and maybe not die so young.

I'm pretty sure, though, that I could use the life I already have in better ways. This is my current (and perennial) dream.

I'm still surprised when I remember I'm a secretary. I must have had a powerful subconsious horror at this fact, because I knew it in October when I first got the job, and then I pretty much forgot it until Spring came and my mind woke up like it does every year. It really feels like my self-reflection was looking the other way for about five months, overwhelmed with disgust when it saw that I was a secretary. I imagine it in a dark chamber, with a nice easy chair, a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers (my self-reflection is chill), sitting in front of a stone fireplace all day reading ewspapers about Greg. It reads the newspaper about Greg's relationship with his friends, The Bantering Tribune. "Hmm, Greg seems to be kind of an asshole to the few friends he manages to keep in touch with . . . I'll let him know about this sometime in April." It flips through the Housing Journal, which disusses Greg's sense of his environment, and shakes it's head. "Tsk, tsk, still bumbling around; will that Greg ever learn?" Then it turns to the Occupational Times, about Greg's working life; a few paragraphs in to the first article, it goes white. "My God, Greg's a . . . no, this is too horrible. I can't look any more! Why is he doing this to himself?" It doesn't read that one for several months, until it has steeled itself, and has a warm cup of chai and some painkillers ready. And here's what it sees:

It's my duty to prepare the outgoing mail every week (to the Board of Directors, the Regional Chairs, and our staff in regional offices), to answer the main office phone and direct the calls to the right people, to track dues payments in the Northeast Region locals, and to do general office work--stuffing envelopes, proofreading or writing letters, preparing agendas for the professional staff's meetings, that sort of thing. I sit at the desk where I'm writing this for about seven hours a day, with breaks for the drive to the post office and my lunch hour (actually hour and fifteen minutes, because my office has its own union and we have really cozy benefits). I use most of my energy thinking about my latest obsession. Anthropology? No, that was this time last year. World history? Sort of ended before it began, but maybe some other time. Writing? No such luck. No, my current obsession is comic books. For two months I've been doing almost nothing else with my time than reading comic books, comic books reviews, comic books histories, and so on. Why? Fucked if I know. It's fun.

So my self-reflection is starting to send me some memos every so often now, in re: employment and interests. They're very respectful memos, and the language can be a little dense and obscure at times (my self-reflection is in a phase where it writes in the language of the eighteenth century), but the message is clear enough: I'm going to die at some point, and I might want to do something with my time first.

I've come in to work today after celebrating the twenty-first birthday of one of Scott's friends from Trader Joe's. We had an absinthe, car bomb and girl drink bout at the Tin Star, while the bartender played concerts by the Pixies, Prince and the Revolution, and Roy Orbison on their gorgeous, large digital television. When I see images like a purple guitar being swung rhythmically to "When You Were Mine," I can understand a little better why people like digital televisions so well.

There were two TJ's friends, and the older of the two is a crazy man named Zeke. He's a fount of energy, waving in place and narrating odd tales even when he's not drunk. The bar stools were perhaps to restrictive for him, because he nearly fell off his several times, expressing only a moment's amazement that he didn't crack his head before jumping into another engagement with whoever's next to him. The bartender's jeep now knows the feel of Zeke's vomit--and to be clear, that's not something I give the check-plus to or anything, but there are some people who can somehow pull that off as fun, and Zeke's one of them. When the bartender came out for a smoke and saw the tire, Zeke burst at him and playfully threatened to do worse, whcih again could go either way (leaning toward shamefulness), but from the bartender's reaction, Zeke obviously has built up enough good will to pull it off as boisterousness. His body and mind leaps from one thing to the next, and though he doesn't quite shout at phantoms, he comes close.

The younger guy, Milljen, is a more laid-back affair, although without Zeke showing him up he'd hold his own. He's a slim, curly haired metal/prog guitar player and recording student at College of Santa Fe, planning to leave before he gets his degree to go full-time with a recording studio in town. His nose is a solid block of bone protruding from the middle of his eyes in a chunk, like a beak, and he can also launch into excited and jumbled stories, but unlike Zeke those stories are a little more predictable; when listening to them, you don't suddenly run into Amelia Stickney, or a gun barrel in Zeke's mouth, or an attempted discussion about Kierkegaard with a pompous Annapolis Johnny.

Eventually, after a quick stop at the Matador (which last year was pitched quite accurately as "Santa Fe's newest dive bar") we made our way to the Atomic Grill for nachos. The Atomic is the only restaurant downtown that's open past, I don't know, nine o'clock. Indeed, they're usually open past two, probably to make sure they get the entire after-bar rush, because somebody has to. There's this one waiter who's almost always there, and even though no one knows otherwise, no one thinks he's the owner. It's a tiny Brit in his thirties or forties, with constantly changing hair color and an endless string of post-punk t-shirts. He's polite, efficient, and hopelessly broken. I wish I knew what happened to him, and why he's always either working at the Atomic or wondering the liquor aisles in grocery stores. (Anne and I have both seen him in a couple of liquor aisles.) He'll listen when customers speak, and smile his broken, reserved smile, but very rarely will he reveal anything about himself. Whether it's busy or not, he mostly stays behind the counter, or quickly circling the tables (always there just when you need more water), breaking down the outdoor set-up, or pacing with a cigarette.

But I've come in to work, and now it's not last night any more. Now it's the cemented sinus, droopy eyed morning after, and I've come in to work even though I could have easily called out sick. Is that sunlight really the gray of a dusty old raincoat, or is it just me?

The discussion in this article, an opinion piece in The L.A. Times by Susan Jacoby, initially struck a chord with me (I think a ringing open G, but I don't have perfect pitch). When I read it a second time, I was somewhat less impressed, but I still think it's an important subject. It's about a growing tendency among Americans to ignore opposing points of view. The article pretty much relies on recognition to make its point, since it doesn't provide any evidence. It also comes from the mindset that everything was better in the past, and hey, isn't it a shame that it isn't so good now? Whether things were better in the past or not, I can't deny that there is a problem now. I was particularly struck by the statement that "[the] spirit of inquiry, which demands firsthand evidence and does not trivialize opposing points of view, is essential to a society's intellectual and political health." I don't see much in the media, from people in my office, or from conversations I hear around me that I would describe as the spirit of inquiry.

I find it unfortuate that Jacoby blames "[a] vast public laziness" for the shoddy reporting, the kind that at best cites the statements of opposing figures in a political argument and calls it a day, without any analysis or discussion. Of course, she's writing in a publication owned by the massive media conglomerate, the Tribune Company, so it's not surprising that she wouldn't find more fault with media entities themselves. Then again, she really does seem to believe that things were different a genearation ago. She pines for the public interest in the Watergate hearings: "I remember those weeks as a period when everyday preoccupations faded into the background and we found time, as a people, to perform our civic duty." Certainly that atmosphere of public inquiry sounds nice, and I don't ultimately doubt that more public interest could lead to a rejuvination of political discussion and better political news, but the presentation here seems to be missing the root of the problem--although I'm not sure what that is myself.

In another article, longer but better and quite worth the time, Steve Fraser writing for tomdispatch describes a different aspect of the widespread lack of interest in significant events. His focus is a second Gilded Age with our huge and growing income inequality and the cronyism seen in every cabinet department (really, every cabinet department, including Labor, HUD, and Treasury--see the first paragraph of the tomdispatcharticle) and all over Congress.

And yet, he points out, despite a similar income disparity and corrupt government, there isn't a cultural and political response anywhere near as deep or loud as there was last time around.

"Fast-forward to our second Gilded Age and the stage seems bare indeed. No great fears, no great expectations, no looming social apocalypses, no utopias or dystopias -- just a kind of flat-line sense of the end of history. Where are all the roiling insurgencies, the break-away political parties, the waves of strikes and boycotts, the infectious communal upheavals, the chronic sense of enough is enough? Where are the earnest efforts to invoke a new order which, no matter how sketchy and full of unanswered questions, now seem as minutely detailed as the blueprints for a Boeing 747 compared to 'yes we can?'"

Fraser plausibly blames the erosion of the industrial working class and the weak labor movement for the lack of fiery rhetoric, passion, and the political muscle that comes with a unified demographic. There is much more to this article, but man, reading it makes me wish I had a more significant job. How ludicrous is it that I work for a labor union, but I have no role in anything interesting like political action or even arguments with management? Instead I answer phones and process membership forms, call the payroll departments in school districts around the state when I notice that dues payments aren't totaling properly, and mostly, read blogs and news articles, or play freerice, because I don't even have much work most of the time.

Last week, I was given a bouquet on Administrative Professionals Day, and it really hit home: I'm an administrative assistant. I knew this already, but it's safe to say that the bouquet, and the statements of my office's leadership team ("we really appreciate your work, everything you do, great job guys") had the oppposite of their intended effect. What kind of Greg am I?