oops

Lately rain is being pre­dicted at about 50% prob­a­bil­ity 24 hours a day, result­ing in real­ity in about 45 min­utes and two inches of rain any­where between 3 and 7 pm, after which the sun cleaves the clouds and I’m sure pro­duces a rain­bow some­where out­side the vis­i­bil­ity of my apart­ment win­dows. It smells like damp cement every night, which is good.

Weeks are fly­ing. I have to stop and remind myself that the sum­mer is tech­ni­cally only a third com­plete. I am wast­ing my time drink­ing sparkling-grapefruit-juice-based cock­tails, rid­ing my bike places to buy more sparkling grape­fruit juice, and read­ing a lot about Ghost Box. The label had a fea­ture arti­cle in an old copy of The Wire mag­a­zine that I once bought because it had Joanna New­som on the cover. I think I threw it out in March, just before I moved, so I had to order another copy, as well as spend as much as I could afford on the Ghost Box releases most likely to go out of print next. I envy this guy:

I hope that when I turn 30 my taste in music doesn’t become depress­ingly banal. It prob­a­bly will. Self-described geek bloggers/Mac dis­ci­ples always grav­i­tate towards the most inof­fen­sive “indie rock” there is.

Ugh, and I hope I never ever turn into a “witty blog­ger,” that demo­graphic makes me nau­seous, one of those Hold Steady-listening, Colbert-worshipping, Pixar-loving, Gui­tar Hero-boasting, identity-cultivating, opinion-spewing, lowbrow-championing, tweet-twittering, Kottke-wannabeing, Peter Pan complex-having man-children who are only capa­ble of mak­ing cheek­ily self-deprecating jokes about their own nar­cis­sism and who like name their iPhones and shit and say “FTW” and “[adj.]. [noun]. Ever” and “the Inter­tubes,” circle-jerking all over the blo­gos­phere OH MAN DIE.

It’s like this anonymity through adopt­ing a sin­gu­lar voice, that same tone, those same inter­ests; half the blogs on Tech­no­rati, it’s that same picture-in-the-corner, “The per­sonal weblog of,” “Ran­dom thoughts from a geeky guy,” every­body wants to need a soap­box but nobody needs one. I’m guilty of it too because it infects you, that tone, cadence, inflec­tion, the way you write when you know any­body might be read­ing what you write, the suf­fo­cat­ing stilt­ed­ness of it. Your audi­ence isn’t your friends, and it isn’t the pop­u­lace at large, so it’s this mid­point between the per­sonal and the imper­sonal, with that safe, dry humor that just makes you look like a twat. Being proud of every nuance of the per­son­al­ity you’re try­ing to man­u­fac­ture through asso­ci­a­tions with pop-culture sig­ni­fiers. Some­body please know what I’m talk­ing about. From now on I promise to be absolutely humor­less, so there are you happy.