Long Time No See

If six weeks is a long time.

In the geologic scale of time (Am I just making up this phrase? Why does it sounds so fake and pretentious?) six weeks is not a long time.

Is there something wrong with me that six weeks seems like a long time?  Yes, it's the delusion I always suffer from--that I will accomplish everything I intend to accomplish in some ridiculously short period of time.

Someone did that, you know. Accomplished some phenomenal thing in six weeks or less. I'm not sure what it was or who it was or when. Only that it has been done.

I'm sure many someones wrote a brilliant novel in six weeks. I can't name anyone off the top of my head. Anthony Trollope wrote forty-seven pretty good novels. He must have written them rather fast. If he didn't finish one in six weeks he at least had 300 pages in six weeks.

They didn't have the internet then.

But that's not all it was. There was just something about those Victorians. Or so everyone says.

But I'm sure it didn't hurt that they had much that mechanized industrial society can give--like eyeglasses and clocks and indoor plumbing-- without the internet.

I, on the other hand, have some kind of brain damage and forgot how to spell 'forty.' It really seems as if it should be spelled 'fourty.' Oh for that middle English unregulated spelling.

The internet has made it quite easy for me to correct my mistake.

When they catalog our decline, I alert you now that the internet will play a significant role. Unless something else gets us first.

If it makes you feel better, apparently Dostoevsky had to be locked in his room naked so that he would write. OK, maybe that just makes me feel better.  Not just to know I'm not the only one but because it makes me want to hug Dostoevsky and the idea of hugging Dostoevsky is so pleasant.

Would he let me hug him? I wonder? Among the famous authors, who do you think would let you hug them? Now that I think about it, I am pretty sure that no famous authors at the current time would let me hug them. So maybe Dostoevsky wouldn't either.

I forgot to mention: I've been a vegetarian for a whole week. Also, I did not fill out the adoption papers yet. But I have been meditating. A little.

I won't be doing the social internet thing until July 10th.

I cannot avoid the internet entirely because my work requires internet. But I think this must be an internet-lite summer.

Except for the Infinite Summer thing. The rules are there are no rules. Yeah!

Except there are some suggested guidelines. So I will do those, kind of, maybe. Start reading Infinite Jest on June 21st and somehow avoid coming to the internet to share my experience.

A true story about Infinite Jest. I once did start reading it one summer. In a hotel I was staying with in a country far away there was a copy in the bookshelf of free books for guests to borrow. I did not finish it since it would not fit in my luggage. Later, the person I was with at this hotel--my paramour and in fact, my true love--took the person that they were cheating on me with [with me on? on with me?] to that very same hotel that very same summer. It is strange how, although I am very over that experience in almost every conceivable way, little things associated with it contain a bit of a deadly charge, that static electricity of former torment.

So I am curious to see if I can remove that charge, replace it with something else. This is a charged time in my life. Will Infinite Jest get a different voltage, acquire the current of what is actually a fairly mild life-on-the-edge-period rather than the barn burner scorched earth destruction of those younger years?

One thing I have often wondered about is why formerly unhappy periods also get tinged with a peculiar nostalgia. I suppose this is not so strange, since (a) they are from my youth and (b) virtually my entire youth was unhappy.  I would have no youthful nostalgia whatsoever if I didn't have nostalgia for my misery. But what is peculiar is that the nostalgic charge is most present on those very items/songs/foods/smells, etc. that were particularly linked to melancholy.

I guess it is the link to feelings that gives people nostalgia and my feelings during my youth leaned heavily toward the melancholic.

But the being-cheated-on year I have no nostalgia for whatsoever. Everything associated with that is entirely nostalgia-free. It was too much like being the victim of a crime. Times where I was a victim of someone else are times I have no nostalgia for. I don't think it's possible to be nostalgic about that.

Odd but I was with some college friends recently and remembering college and all my 'wow, what a time' memories were really just times I had with myself. Driving my junker car through the countryside alone and realizing I was almost out of gas, then later having two junkies help me restart the car (that did run out of gas...in the driveway of the gas station) by dropping gas on the carburetor, watching the Sikh gardener use his topiary skills to cut the bushes into the shape of animals I could not identify, staying up all night to write a paper and watching the glorious dawn, then startling a thief in the parking lot of my dorm who was stealing the radios out of cars.

In the bar with my friends, I realized my friends were nostalgic about all the times we had together and I was only nostalgic about all the times I had the sense of being entirely alone.

I really like these nerd tattoos. They basically say 'I don't plan to live all that long.'   Ah, to live in the eternal now. Clearly, these people have been meditating a lot.

Comments

[slouching mom]

i've got the fourty-forty problem, too.

[roo]

I just visited the nerd tat site, and the Don't Panic 42 tat reminded me that Douglas Adams also apparently had to be locked into his room to write. He said something to the effect that he loved deadlines-- he loved the whooshing sound they made as they whizzed past.

So you and Dostoevsky aren't alone. Hugs for everyone!

Although, since the other two people you're hugging are dead, you are alone. But that's good too, right?