The Wire

There are good reasons for The Wire to be so ubiquitously lauded by critics, and those reasons definitely found their way into my own head as I came to experience the sheer heft of the thing. Reviews that refer to the show as "novelistic" aren't kidding; what starts out as a cop show quickly becomes much more. With every season the scope broadens, the relationships flourish, the politics fascinate. It took me a couple months to get through all 5 seasons, but boy am I glad I did. What a show!

By the way, more Simpsonized treatments of The Wire drawn by Steve Lieber can be found at Periscope Studio. Love them!

Iambic Pentameter

We sat around a stained table in the art room reading Julius Caesar today. First readings are what they are, forgiving and unspectacular. But Shakespeare firsts have a special luster; they glimmer with a powerful, directionless angst.

Something about reading Shakespeare brings out the same kind of slow, evenly measured and ominous vocal dynamics in any number of otherwise very talented actors, and this group was no exception.

So I learned today that Antony and Brutus are basically the same person. They both talk slowly and with a kind of fleeting wistfulness, ending each of their sentences with an erudite nod to some sort of sublime, distant oblivion, and everything they say is earnest, loud, acontextual, and very, very important.

Oh, you blithering would-be nobles, you.

My Ex was Awful

I've found that often when somebody bitches about their ex it sets people off quite a bit. Something about it is suspect, as there's always a danger to appear not quite over it, or bitter, or a number of other things.

But people bitch about *everything.* They bitch about their cars, they bitch about their mortgages, they bitch about their jobs. And also about other people: bosses, employees, sisters, parents, friends, babysitters, that guy with the grimace on the other side of the bus.

And they bitch about their Ex's.

I'm not going to bitch about my ex. All of the bitching I could possibly do was expunged like so much excrement when I committed myself to the act of dumping her and never looking back.

Who was she? The short answer is that she was a good person. I like to look back on these things positively. The slightly longer answer is that she was a raging, inconsolable snob from Orange County who had flattered herself to no end for her decadence and insisted on surrounding herself with mirror copies of herself. This included her boyfriend.

So she fell in love with me and I felt guilty, so I kept her even though she made me sick like last week's pie left on the counter for too many days. Don't tell anybody, but I think the reason she fell for me was because the sex was good. That's her opinion, not mine, though she called it "love" and I called it evidence that she had been quite direly unsatisfied before. Apparently her prior boytoys didn't know the first thing about how to please a woman, which shouldn't be surprising considering that my ex was interested less in sex than in portfolios and assets.

So I grinned and bore her for over a year and then I dumped her. I've neverly looked on the memory of a relationship so ambivalently. Usually I make peace with them. But everybody in the world isn't great and deserving of affection in memory, and I think I've had to make peace with the fact that this girl, bless her soul, is one of the ones that just plain isn't.

Bloggin'

One of these days I'll get around to putting a page together from scratch, but I'm so rusty at the craft at this point that this will have to do for the time being.

The purpose might change later on, but for the time being this thing is strictly an act of self-indulgence. Here's a stupid picture just for the hell of it:



Now isn't that satisfying.

So anyhow. I've no delusions about providing a service to others in the form of information or entertainment, nor do I adopt anything like the manic internet marketer mantra that makes any piddling thought on this or that other matter (the closer to David Allen the better) like gold. Coming from my own mouth, for reasons of my character more than anything, I fear that I'd view such things as suspect. I'm much better off leaving it to people who are much better at it than I am.

I used to keep a blog over on livejournal, which I've often been told was interestingly written enough, I think, to serve as entertainment purposes for the prose alone. I've never used this medium as merely a sounding board, though I have nothing against those who do; I simply felt that there was so much that could be done with it, something that fascinates and confuses while paradoxically remaining utterly straight forward. I love writing, so I've recently tended towards something like blog fiction.

I could also blog about my life. Though I fear my life's gotten rather bland of late. And the power of words have a kind of magic that can make anything epic. Should I care more about exhibiting my own life as though it were more interesting than it is?

I anticipate the possibility that it works the other way around: perhaps blogging can in fact function to make one's life more interesting.

Probably what I will end up doing, if indeed I end up doing anything at all, is figuring out my own interests as I go along (they are many and sometimes feel quite mutually exclusive), and just run with them as best I can.