On the intersection of postmodernism and diner meals

Wherein I try to confine the wankery to the first paragraph

In the wake of Jean Baudrillard's recent death, I've decided to try reading some of his work. I picked up America at Skylight tonight as it's supposedly one of his more accessible works. So far, I love it... the book is written in a poetic style, and consists of observations about the United States from one of Europe's preeminent postmodernists. It was written in 1986, so I was concerned that it was going to be dated, but because Reagan's America never ended Baudrillard's critique is still very timely. It definitely helps to have read The Society of the Spectacle. If contemporary life can be defined as "capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image" (one of many observations on "the spectacle" compiled by Guy Debord), then Baudrillard shows us how we live in that hyperreal existence.

That being said, I'd advise one against reading it when eating at a diner by oneself.

After buying the book I walked across the street to House of Pies. Since I haven't had a lot of patience for being around people outside of work lately, I've been doing that quite a bit; going out by myself for a meal, with a book to replace table conversation. I call it "mastur-dating." For the first time in ages I ate until I was physically ill: I finished my soup before the mushroom-and-bacon-laden hamburger showed up at the table, and even though I was only able to make it through three-quarters of the burger I just had to order pie because the restaurant is called House of Pies for a reason, for fuck's sake. Anyway, I came across this little conclusion by Baudrillard just before my meal's strawberry pie dénouement:

Yet there is a certain solitude like no other - that of the man preparing his meal in public on a wall, or on the hood of his car, or along a fence, alone. You see that all the time here. It is the saddest sight in the world. Sadder than destitution, sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honour of sharing or disputing each other's food. He who eats alone is dead (but not he who drinks alone. Why is this?).

All this is to say that I'm taking Baudrillard's words as a sign that I need to rejoin the world. Expect phone calls and emails to be returned shortly!

It's pretty sad that a Democratic-controlled Senate is roughly as effective as your average student council when it comes to de-escalating the war in Iraq.

OK, deleted this one too. It was also drama-queeney, and that's not who I'm trying to be. I'm leaving the last bit, because I thought it was funny.

Bone's Corrolary to the First Law of Thermodynamics: The amount of douchebaggery present in the universe is constant and cannot be created or destroyed. D=MC²

Post deleted. No need for me to indulge in drama-queenery.

Today my mom would have been 60.

A few months ago, I left a comment on a post at CRN which read in part, "When Mom died, I didn't cry for four years. I didn't think about her, or my loss and what it meant in my life at all… which meant, of course, that I was constantly thinking about it. Her absence didn't so much create a hole in me as carve out a hole into which I fell, one so large that I couldn't even see its edges to know the extent to which it existed." I've since learned to talk about it, to give voice to grief, and that's helped me metabolize the pain to a huge extent.

But, some days....

I wonder what she'd be like today. She was, in many ways, the most vivacious person I've ever met, with a large circle of friends, random creative projects (many of which would remain ever unfinished as the current of her attention pitched and turned to new things), and an ability to make herself the center of attention wherever she went. There was also something lost about her, something sad... but even her sadness was beautiful.

There have been so many changes in my own life since she got sick in 1999: two crosscountry moves, jobs taken and left, relationships started and finished, my own health issues... yet none of them has had even remotely the same degree of impact upon me as her death in 2000. I'd give anything to be able to talk to her about all of these things, because I suspect that she'd have a special insight into most of them, and I'll never stop mourning the fact that I don't get to do so anymore.

Reasons I'm bummed out

1. The distance between "wait and see" and "now or never" keeps impacting my life, both personally and professionally.

2. I had jury duty last week, and like every other time I've ever had it I was selected for a trial. So, I'll be downtown for the next few days. Legally I can't talk about the case yet, but it's just one of the most depressing things possible.

(It could be worse... I went Wednesday morning for the first time, and that morning they were pulling a pool of potential jurors for the Phil Spector murder trial. Had I been selected for that event-it's supposed to last for a few months-my cry of anguish would have been the real "wall of sound")

3. I read American Fascists yesterday. Sigh. We're screwed. I probably should have followed up by listening to "Gloomy Sunday" while watching An Inconvenient Truth... in the dark, with a bottle of gin in my hand.

(An interview with author Chris Hedges can be found here. He cites Umberto Eco's excellent essay Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt at the opening of the book, which you can find here)

Reasons to go on

1. I got to hear bass Morris Robinson singing Mozart's O Isis und Osiris- one of the perfect pieces of music- on NPR the other day.

2. Holy shit, my voice is back after three months of sounding like utter hell. I don't know how long it'll hold for, but for the moment I'm enjoying it.