In the meantime, here are some numbers for you:

1: The number of known readers who have finished The Best of All Possible Worlds.
3: The number of books I have finished reading since the crisis began (White Noise, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Snow Crash).
4: The number of games the Mariners have won since the crisis began.
12: The number of pounds I have lost since the crisis began.
17: The number of days elapsed since the crisis began.
17.8: The number representing my current body mass index (BMI).
27: The length, in inches, of my longest hair.
46: The number of people who have contacted me in some way to express condolences on my situation.
50: The number of dollars you will have to pay to haul away Fish’s “antique” mirror.
82: The score for my first game of bowling last night, being the first sub-100 tally I can remember getting since I first learned to bowl in my youth.
124: The number of pounds I currently weigh.
125: The score for my second game of bowling last night.

The theme for this post is “Summer Chill”. There are many possible interpretations of that phrase and I would hazard that all of them are relevant to the intended scope of this post. Read closely, pay attention. You may be surprised what you see. Or you may find the theme trite and blase, which it probably is in some ways, and go off to read about Lady Gaga.

I have discerned that Americans very much don’t like to be hot. This is probably because Americans, as a rule and general practice, are overweight. The precise coordination between weight and heat aversion took me a long time to figure out, but has become in the last few years one of those obvious and universal truths, like “donuts are tasty” or “parents have a lot of both direct and indirect influence on their offspring”. It took me longer to figure out this particular truth because it is generally considered impolite in this society to discuss the weight of other people. Thus conversations like this are unwelcome:

“I’m hot.”
“Really? I think it’s rather pleasant.”
“Well I think it’s too hot.”
“Hm. I guess you are a little pudgy.”

Comments on weight are especially unwelcome from people like me who, despite a two-year period of being somewhat overweight in the middle part of this decade, have otherwise been rail-thin. Since I rekindled my metabolism after its premature death at 27, I’ve gone back to being cold everywhere relative to every other human being, including even those who normally serve the role of being the coldest person they know. Ha ha!

Never is this phenomenon more apparent or frustrating than eating out during the summer in the United States. A phenomenon that I swear was predominantly limited to Florida during my youth has since gone nationwide, and now I must never leave my house without a jacket in summer if there’s even the slightest chance I will be asked to dine somewhere before returning home. In LA, in Albuquerque, in Philadelphia, I relied on my Mariners jacket to save me from hypothermic expiration in the bitterly frigid confines of restaurant after restaurant. After the third one, I stopped asking if I needed to bring my jacket. I would hit the swinging-door threshold, feel the blood harden in my veins, and suit up.

What’s ridiculous about the whole thing is that people keep restaurants at temperatures that no one would enjoy at any other time of year. Two in particular, Waffle House in Albuquerque and Los Segundos in Philadelphia, had the thermostat well below 68 degrees. Imagine going from a crisp November night into a restaurant kept in that meteorological condition. There would be literally no business. No one would go. So why does it being summer make it more acceptable? Why does everyone get to presume that all patrons have just run a marathon in their fat suits before entering their building?

Yes, this is part of an absurd class of things rapidly becoming known as “First World Problems” – the complaints only the spoiled of our species could possibly imagine worrying about, the offshoot of a pampered instant-gratification culture centered on the self. A waste of time, probably, but one that is both alienating to experience and hopefully a bit humorous to relate. And also, perhaps, emblematic of that selfsame pampered spoiled society itself, that we have created expensive, energy-wasting cultural standards and practices designed to cater further to our own self-centered obesity. It’s like the whole thing spirals on itself into the stratosphere to the point where to even observe or complain about our society’s missteps has itself become a misstep that presumes caring about the fate of that society. Paragraph summary: we’re in a fine mess indeed.

I’m reading Don DeLillo’s White Noise and it’s done something that Golding, Tolstoy, Foucault, and Calvino have failed to do in the last month or so: hold my attention. Granted that Tolstoy held my attention about four times as long as DeLillo’s even trying to, so maybe it’s a weak comparison. But he’s also done something else that the other four never approached: scare me. Not because his 1985 vision of the present or the future comes across much like all those movies I’ve seen lately (”Koyaanisqatsi”, “My Dinner with Andre”, “Dial H-i-s-t-o-r-y”, “Double Take”) in its prescient understanding of the incredibly insular self-absorption and chaos to come (it does), but because it reminds me of my own book just finished and nearly fully edited, The Best of All Possible Worlds. Not in whole, not overall (yet), but in certain scenes and themes and focal points. And it not only predates the book by 25 years, but I had never read one word or heard one thing about it before finishing my own tome.

This is at once highly problematic and a little relieving. It’s the former for obvious reasons – on a planet of seven-billion willed agents, I constantly fear accidentally rewriting another person’s book that I’ve never had contact with, just because there are only so many ideas or thoughts out there. As a writer whose greatest asset is originality of ideas, this could lead to unmitigated disaster. At the same time, it’s relieving because the publishing world seems very focused on “comps” – equivalent books to the one being pitched to them that they can in turn use to pitch to potential readers, writing such ridiculous drivel on the back of books as “…with the rich landscape of John Steinbeck, the emotional insight of Sigmund Freud, and the quick-paced action of Dashiell Hammett…” I made that up, but you get the point. No one is allowed to be themselves, at least not at first. Everything has to be derivative. And since I’ve never read anything remotely like The Best of All Possible Worlds, it’s encouraging to run across DeLillo just in time to be able to put a comp in my cover letter.

But also scary. Really, really scary, depending on where it all ends up.

I’m back in Tiny House, by the way, mostly just to block everything else out and finish editing before departing again for roadtrips that will lead up to my series of flights to Africa. The editing is about 70% complete, though there’s the second round of it that comes when I transcribe my red-lined notes into the electronic file that contains the work. It’ll take a while, maybe up to five days. But as an only child, I sometimes just need to be alone, especially to buckle down and do work. Once the work is done, really done, I’ll be sending it out to friends and the one agent who wanted first crack at it, then probably hit the road once more.

So, uh, public service announcement: This is your open call to let me know if you want to read The Best of All Possible Worlds. Your odds are better if you’ve already read and commented on American Dream On, though it would be absurdly self-indulgent of me to require this. Honestly, if you’re my friend and want to see it, that’s enough. Send me an e-mail.

And to leave you on a fun fact for the day, so that we can all laugh about the past and be awed by the present, here’s your news: The girl who said she couldn’t be friends with someone who had a blog had a blog. Far more fascinating than that is what she’s spent the last nine years doing, forsaking some of the first-world concerns she seemed to have in 2001 for time in the Peace Corps in Mauritania and working in Sri Lanka before coming back stateside to work for a really cool organization. I would say I’m proud of her, but that sounds really weird and probably obnoxious since I may have had nothing at all to do with it, especially given the way things ended. So, uh, I don’t have anything to say. Yeah.

I’ve summed up homecomings of all sorts with the following lyrical quotation throughout much of my life. It always has this way of being more transcendentally accurate and true than even all the times I’ve utilized it before. Guess what, “Awareness is Never Enough – It Must Always Be Wonder”? You just got to be the sixth category for this post!

“Looking all around the room
I see the clutter and the gloom
I’m not only back
I’m not only numb”
-Gin Blossoms, “Not Only Numb”

For the unfamiliar, which should be everyone (Gris?) and would’ve been me a day ago, he’s made only two real films in English as far as I can discern, but they’re both appallingly good. One’s playing at Albuquerque’s barely-breathing Guild theater in Nob Hill by the university district, 2009’s “Double Take”, a film ostensibly about Alfred Hitchcock, but much more about the Cold War, power politics, media, and what’s going on with the planet. My Dad and I saw that last night and had to come home to find his other film, 1997’s “Dial H-i-s-t-o-r-y”, which is about 9/11. Except it was made four years before 9/11. But watch it and tell me it’s about anything else. You can find it online; you may still have to pay to see Double Take.

Almost exactly halfway through editing The Best of All Possible Worlds, putting me well behind the expected pace at this point, though that indicates a general enjoyment of this trip that has made it all worthwhile. The themes for the book are finding resonance in all kinds of places, not least perhaps in the Grimonprez movies, all of which means that either the book is scarily relevant or I’ve just got it on the brain. Reality is probably a mix of both, but it’s generated a comfortable excitement for me about the work that has prompted this very lax attitude about actually getting the editing done. I think once I get on the plane tomorrow and head back to the East, it’ll be time to just put my foot down and get work done. If only so you all can have some idea what I’m talking about.

In the last couple months, I’ve found it harder than any prior point in my life to focus on reading one thing. In the midst of watching Dial H-i-s-t-o-r-y tonight, I realized that I’ve been carrying around Don DeLillo’s White Noise in my backpack since buying it alongside If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler in Ariel & Michael’s favorite Philadelphia bookstore. All I want to do tonight is start it, setting aside editing yet again and certainly bypassing The Spire and War and Peace and Madness and Civilization. Prior to this year, I don’t know if I’d ever gone more than a week or so reading multiple books at once and now I’m on the precipice of starting a fifth simultaneous book. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I mean, sure, I’ve lost some interest in all of them in one way or another, and maybe that’s the problem, that I haven’t just given up on most of them. What does it say about now or my state or something else that I seem incapable of completing readings while churning out novels of my own? Why am I losing interest so quickly? How will I be impacted when I head to Liberia and have to hole up with books for days on end, according to what Emily has led me to believe about the schedule there?

Speaking of which, it’s the first anniversary of our seven to date that Emily and I have been apart. It’s enormously challenging, but I take some solace in the nice round joy of the sound of seven years. A marriage is forever, but it takes some time for its lifespan to start sounding like something that reflects the permanence and seriousness of the commitment it contains. I’m not sure quite where the threshold is, but seven years seems a lot closer than any of the prior milestones.

Been spending much of this leg of the trip discussing the nature of God with my Dad, working out Jumbles and crossword puzzles with surprising interest and aptitude, downing green chile and old memories in equal measure. Just a moment ago, I landed, and already the plane station looms with its promise to whisk me back away. The tighter I hold on, the more sure I become of the need to step back, relax, put it all in context. Watch my Mom knitting in the comfy corner chair. Pull the threads.

I’ve posted about this before, and probably not too long ago. Maybe even on a May 17th before, in this exact place in the universe, looping back ’round to it again. Here we are. It’s not a new concept or a particularly hard concept, but it’s one I feel the need to revisit. When the tide is high with the creative process, lots of writing, a surprising about of reading for how much writing there’s been, then other forms of writing, the chaff, this blog, take a direct hit.

The corollary in the other direction was long obvious – that this blog would get the most attention and care when I was at a low tide creatively in the rest of my life. The times when my job was tugging at my soul and the commute was eating my time would give birth to long flowy metaphorical examinations of my real life in the moment. It was fun, and at least one of you thinks it’s way better than the non-chaff meaningful stuff I try to produce now. It will probably come again sometime, but it is not the time for it now so much. And that’s good.

This is largely because the life itself is relatively unnoteworthy. Sure, stuff happens – Em and I went to a AA baseball game today in Trenton and played bocce ball with friends on the lawn of our military-barrack-trailer-park complex. The sun shone, people bid each other a pleasant summer, embarked for new adventures. Em and I watched two of the four series we’re following on Netflix. We made more plans for the summer to come. But these are the undulations of life of the everyday. And the rest of my time makes these times look fascinating.

Because the rest of my time is extremely unreportable, the most of the mundane. I sit down at the computer at a designated time, aiming for 2-3 sessions each day instead of the normal single overnight session because of the time crunch I’m facing and what a washout April was. I play Tetris, trying to imbue myself with the mood appropriate for quick, magical writing. At a certain point, I stop, having formulated the first sentence to two paragraphs. I switch over to Word, enter my trance, and go. Anywhere from 30 to 150 minutes later, I stop, usually suddenly on a particularly sharp conclusion for that section. I come up for air quickly, surveying practical considerations like how many words I’ve written and whether I’ve overlooked anything intended for that section. Sometimes a quick review, but often not – there’s plenty of time for editing the month after the deadline. Then I start to meditate on the next section and do something mundane like eat or sleep or read.

That’s my life. And when Em departs for Liberia in a week and a half, it will be without those other preliminary things like baseball games and bocce ball and Netflix. It is hard to envision as mundane, because it feels like the most vibrant and important part of my life I’ve ever lived. Every moment carries the sense of purpose that’s so effectively eluded most of the uses of my time. Every day feels deliberate and worth living. But talking about it? Explaining it? Highlighting some quirky thing to capitalize into a post here? Forget it. To the outside observer, writing is about as exciting as watching paint dry.

I guess there are a good number of breaks, though, and this is where the conservation comes in. I did go down to Baltimore for the two Mariner losses in their three-game set with the Orioles early last week. I saw two old friends and ate in two different Waffle Houses a total of three times. I could write the better part of a novel about the third game alone, probably the most objectively exciting game I’ve ever seen, with the final out recorded on a play at the plate that would’ve tied the game. But I don’t have the juice to, because it’s all going to the novel right now.

So maybe it’s not my life that’s any more mundane, for day jobs and commutes are awfully mundane too. It’s probably just about the energy, the focus, the dispersal of creativity leading to blippy vignettes, while extended intense concentration that saps everything else is required to produce the 100,000 word novel.

Let one thing be clear in all of this: I am not complaining.

For the unfamiliar, this is an aggregate effort to rank the best books of all-time as viewed by my friends and other visitors to the Blue Pyramid. This remains one of the most popular elements of the BP and generating this much interest about books surely is unlikely to hurt an aspiring author.

This update, I decided to tack on a little extra, so I ran some numbers about the Top Authors on the Book List as well, done up with some snazzy but small pics. No matter how you slice and dice the stats, it’s hard to underestimate the overwhelming impact Harper Lee had with one 300-page volume. With 494 total points, not only is she the sole and dominant place-holder of the top book of all-time, but her single tome puts her 5th in aggregate points for all authors. Only Tolkien, Shakespeare, Orwell, and Garcia Marquez could beat her, needing an average of 6.25 books each to do so.

The late great J.D. Salinger is well represented as well, checking in as 10th author of all-time on the whole and 4th in quality-per-book for those with more than one volume on the List. Surely this is helped by the fact that not one of the 89 submitters includes Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction among their 25 best.

A late list I considered adding but didn’t, mostly for fear of making this project too onerous to update (I do it less than once a year as-is), is a list of top books that none of the 89 submitters consider their all-time favorite. What’s remarkable is how many of the very highest regarded books still escape the #1 slot for anyone. Most impressive among these is 1984, which is 2nd place all-time despite receiving zero first place votes. I wonder what it says that these books are so widely regarded, but no one would take them as their only choice to a desert island…

1. 1984, George Orwell, 2nd overall
2. Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 9th overall
3. The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien, 10th overall
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 14th overall
5. Night, Elie Wiesel, 17th overall
6. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte, 20th overall
7. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, 21st overall
8. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 22nd overall
9. The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien, 23rd (tied) overall
10. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 25th (tied) overall

Of course, on the flip side, no fewer than 21 of the 89 first-place-vote-getters (a full 24%) are unique books, appearing on none of the other 88 lists. So there’s probably something about the process of picking a favorite that’s more likely to make it unique than the average book.

It will either happen today or February 14, 1958 when I am sixteen. It is ridiculous to mention even.

When people in my generation haven’t been in contact for a long time, or haven’t posted to their webpage or other expected forms of social media/communication, they tend to break the silence with the phrase “I’m alive” or, less frequently, “I’m not dead.” Where this custom originated is hard to trace, like any viral meme of our culture, but it is surely prevalent. When my father took a long absence from posting on his page, a relative wrote in fear that something had happened. It’s hard to argue that this is the frequent concern of people when a long absence is experienced, but our society tends to “go there” pretty quickly. J.D. Salinger is probably about as far from a social media type person as I can imagine living into the twenty-first century.

On November 22, 1963, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis died. No one particularly noticed because John F. Kennedy was shot that day as well.

In a discussion of next steps for my new novel American Dream On, my father purported that the fifty best books written in the last hundred years were never published. I told him that if I believed that, I would give up all hope. And while part of my disproof for his theory is The Catcher in the Rye, part of his rebuttal might include the unpublished works Salinger has famously kept in a safe for much of the last few decades. My excitement for the release of these works is perhaps the only heartening element of the developments of Wednesday.

I want them to have a nice time while they’re alive, because they like having a nice time… But they don’t love me and Booper – that’s my sister – that way. I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more. It’s not so good, that way.

When I was 18, I compiled a list of the hundred best books of all-time. All Salinger’s four published works made the cut, ranging from 10th (Catcher) to 61st (Franny and Zooey). Catcher had slipped to 12th on my list by 2002, but checks in at 5th on the composite list of 73 Blue Pyramid friends and visitors. Franny and Zooey is 69th. In 2008, I finally got around to compiling my favorite 17 short stories of all-time. They were bookended by Salinger works from Nine Stories, with “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” checking in 17th and “Teddy” 1st.

J.D. Salinger was born in 1919. Ray Bradbury was born in 1920. Richard Adams was born in 1920. Kurt Vonnegut was born in 1922. Howard Zinn was born in 1922.

Salinger’s obituaries were coated with accounts of his life as a recluse. These overshadowed any particular discussion of his works and their enormous qualities. His life was discussed as the story of potential gone bad, of talent gone crazy, of a light of the world snuffed out by his own misanthropy. There were the isolation and the lawsuits and the affairs and the urine-drinking rumors and everything beneath tepid notes about Catcher that still couldn’t resist citing the man who shot John Lennon. And censorship. Outcry. Controversy.

But I wouldn’t have had to get incarnated in an American body if I hadn’t met that lady. I mean it’s very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you’re a freak if you try to.

I haven’t been posting Duck and Covers lately because my scanner is broken. It used to have trouble, but now it seems completely ka-put. My phone line has been out for days, too, if you’ve been trying to get ahold of me. It keeps saying the line is in use and when I pick it up, the dialtone is replaced by a noise that sounds like someone is on the other line, but has set the phone down for a bit. I’d imagine it generates a perpetual busy-signal to anyone who tries to call. It’s had trouble like that before, where it hangs up on anyone calling in, but with this problem I can’t call out either.

Ray Bradbury and Richard Adams are still alive. They are hoping to turn 90 this year.

Salinger had allegedly promised the release of all his unpublished works upon his death, though it’s unlikely his estate will grant the right of others to hijack Holden Caulfield for use in an examination of what he’d think of being alive at 70. My suspicion was always that he didn’t want someone to write that book because he’d already written it, but that remains to be seen. Unfortunately, it remains to be seen over a devastatingly long period of time to come. Were there any justice in the publishing industry, all 15-20 tomes would be released in quick succession, maybe one a month, a cavalcade of Salinger’s views on the world we’ve lived through for the last half-century. But at their pace, we’ll be lucky to live long enough to read all of Salinger’s already written work. Hell, they haven’t even released The Pale King yet… nor do they plan to for 15 months.

My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.

On January 7, 2010, I sent American Dream On to twenty-two volunteer readers. Five more have since added themselves to the list. As of today (January 29, 2010), only three have finished reading the book. None of them have full-time jobs or are attending school.

On January 27, 2010, Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger died. Between these two events, President Barack Obama addressed the nation on its State for the first official time in his tenure. He noted that “it’s tempting to look back on these moments and assume that our progress was inevitable – that America was always destined to succeed.” He seemed to be warning against impending calamity. He went on to conclude that “We can do what’s necessary to keep our poll numbers high, and get through the next election instead of doing what’s best for the next generation. But I also know this: If people had made that decision 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 200 years ago, we wouldn’t be here tonight. The only reason we are here is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard; to do what was needed even when success was uncertain; to do what it took to keep the dream of this nation alive for their children and their grandchildren.” His dire tone about America’s future was belied by his eternal affable smile, made somehow more Bushlike by its inappropriateness while trying to empathize with unemployed families or explaining why US soldiers will continue to kill Afghans after a decade of doing so. Bush at least kept the smile to the corners of his mouth, always on the verge of an inappropriate grin. Obama’s grin seems to crest, convincing you that he’s really enjoying himself up there despite the calamity he portends.

Salinger’s reclusion begs the question of why one is writing at all. He insisted that he enjoyed writing for himself, noting notedly in 1974 that “There’s a marvelous peace in not publishing. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” With all appropriate apologies, Jerome, this is phony. You were being a phony when you said this. People who believe that do not write. They sit around and think their own thoughts. And if they do write, if they do find some pathological urge to put their thoughts to paper because they love the artisanship of crafting the idea despite not wanting to share it, they insist their works get burned upon their death. Or they burn them themselves, just to make sure. (You’ll note Kafka, who was not born in the early 1920’s, never did this.) Certainly they do not insist their works are published upon their death. People who do that cannot live with the repercussions of their misunderstanding, Jerome, but they also cannot live without trying to be understood. Without trying to share what they have to share with the world. So I see that. I see you. I see that you could not face the same tribulation and misunderstanding that plagued Catcher, that plagued Holden. But you had to try anyway. You had to try to get out a message, to be understood. Which is what we will wait for, obnoxious greedy publishers’ delay or no.

For example, I have a swimming lesson in about five minutes. I could go downstairs to the pool, and there might not be any water in it. This might be the day they change the water or something. What might happen, though, I might walk to the edge of it, just to have a look at the bottom, for instance, and my sister might come up and sort of push me in. I could fracture my skull and die instantaneously.

In February, Emily will return to classes and I will start writing Good God and the Rutgers team will start debating again and I will buy a new scanner/printer and get my phone fixed and I will turn thirty years old. In February. Which is still three days hence.

J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn fought in World War II. Richard Adams was in the British Army for the duration of the war, but did not fight in it. Ray Bradbury was writing science fiction stories.

We write to be understood. No matter how hard that is, how long the odds are, how impossible it might seem. His literary agent said “Salinger had remarked that he was in this world but not of it.” It is hard to imagine a more fitting epitaph for this writer, for any writer. But being in creates an obligation, an obligation to try to be understood. He tried. His works will try. The only reason to write, really, is to make contact with other human beings. He was a coward, perhaps, or made a desperate failed attempt not to let personality overshadow works which he wanted to speak for themselves. But he wanted, wants, will want, to be understood.

Halfway down the passage, a stewardess was sitting on a chair outside the galleyway, reading a magazine and smoking a cigarette. Nicholson went down to her, consulted her briefly, thanked her, then took a few additional steps forwardship and opened a heavy metal door that read: TO THE POOL. It opened onto a narrow, uncarpeted staircase. He was little more than halfway down the staircase when he heard an all-piercing, sustained scream – clearly coming from a small, female child. It was highly acoustical, as though it were reverberating within four tiled walls.

The story went on to be novelized and is probably more known in that form, though I never got around to reading the novel. I really should (put it on the list – the endless list that is making no progress since writing full-time has somehow rendered me more or less unable to read). I’m not sure of the subtle differences and there’s a part of me that thinks what was in the reader may have actually been (gack) the abridged novel and not the actual original short story. Doesn’t matter. What hit home was the concept of the work.

The gist of “Flowers for Algernon” (spoiler alert!) is that this guy with a 68 IQ is given the opportunity to undergo an experimental surgery that triples his intelligence. Algernon is the lab rat that preceded him in this test and becomes his friend. The surgery works and we get information from the primary source (the guy being experimented on) about his increased intelligence and how he can see the world. His intelligence not only initially surges, but it increases over time, making him smarter and smarter while the rest of the world is left sort of dumbfounded by their inability to relate to him.

Now reading this after skipping four grades would seem to have a pretty obvious and explicable impact right there. But this is not actually what stuck with me particularly, though I could well relate to the isolation the subject was feeling. Rather, what stood out was the tail-end of the story, where Algernon suddenly declines precipitously, eventually dying as his brain basically atrophies to the point of disappearance. And of course the subject, the source of the story, realizes this is his fate as well and is irreversible. And the slow creeping horror of having intelligence, of knowing that you’re going to lose it, of being capable of understanding one’s own impending decay – this is what stuck with me.

The story aided this, of course, by being extremely well written and chronicling his slow decline as his speech slurs and his grasp on understanding slips and he finds himself increasingly desperate to chronicle his last intelligent thoughts, then thoroughly frustrated by what he can’t do, and finally rendered utterly amazed by what he used to write and can no longer comprehend.

Today, I slammed my head into an absurd metal bar protruding from the dumpster-sized recycling bin across the street from us. I was carrying an overfull box of paper recycling and had set it down under the bar without seeing the bar or consciously registering it, making sure to set it down out of the street.

Then I stood up. Fast.

I didn’t see stars or lose vision or even hurt that much. It took me a second to realize what had happened and then I had a frantic 30 seconds trying to assess how bad the injury was. I feared blacking out in the road. Then it didn’t hurt too much and I looked at the nasty metal pole and cursed its arbitrary existence and wondered why I wasn’t hurt worse. And lamented the fact that I seem to be remarkably accident-prone lately, what with the tiger toe and all, and then I settled in and worried about Algernon.

I think I worry about this a lot, for some reason, and it’s hard to say if I did before reading the story or if the story is entirely responsible. Discussions of Alzheimer’s have a similar affect on me, though it’s unclear how long one has to be aware that one is losing one’s mind under those conditions. I think it all has something to do with my general sense of urgency, my concerns about an early death, the whole picture. The sense that I’m just one stupid accident away from being plunged into a slow devastating decay toward unintelligence.

It’s not that I’m one of those super klutzy people or am always going around walking into walls. But I do have trouble with spatial realities, as those who really have logged the most time with me can attest. I fundamentally question the world’s physical existence and like to think as little as possible about my own body as a corporeal entity. I don’t always double-check my surroundings for poles or obstacles. I got in the habit around puberty or a little before of running around everywhere, moving quickly, something that probably relates to the upside of manic depression or is perhaps a lingering testament to my youthful exuberance. None of these really add up to an avoidance of objects that could do me harm, especially (I guess) when it’s combined with illness or the things I’m relenting to take to combat same. As evidenced by the toe and now the head.

Long story short, I think I’m fine. I got really sleepy at 8 PM and went to bed for two hours, prompting a huge conversation about whether I was concussed just before I rested. The thing doesn’t even hurt, unless I touch it, in which case it’s very sensitive and kind of welty and painful. But I wouldn’t notice it if I just left it alone. The thinking, though, that’s an issue. I notice myself monitoring myself, trying to make sure I’m still firing on all cylinders, that I still have my cognizance.

Maybe it’s a ridiculous fear to have. But the only head I’ve ever been in is this one and I’m quite fond of what it enables me to perceive. As Dan Quayle said, a mind is a terrible thing to lose. If only I didn’t have so many other functions attached to my head. Or could stop using it as an attempted battering ram.

It should be noted that I have avoided reading Sedaris, despite recommendations from many of my friends, because he falls into a series of literary categories that I tend to dislike. For one thing, most of his writing is based on his own life, sort of straddling the boundaries of fiction and non, which is one of my least favorite forms of narrative writing (I read almost exclusively fiction for a reason). Perhaps more importantly, he tries to be funny.

There is some genuinely comedic writing out there, but I would argue it is almost a prerequisite that one be British before attempting to execute it. P.G. Wodehouse is hysterical, Gordon Korman (Canadian is close enough, eh?) can inspire truly bellowing laughter, but most American writers, especially of a more recent age, are unable to find what is truly humorous about human interaction. Most of them instead rely on scapegoating, stereotyping, and making people uncomfortable. This is unsurprisingly also my objection to stand-up comics and the entire genre of American comedic films with very few exceptions. Making fun of people, especially by caricaturing them (and often for attributes beyond their control), simply doesn’t interest me.

Moreover, my whole interest in the genre of “let me tell you about my crazy weird childhood in humorous tones” pretty much uttered its last breath by the time I got done watching the film “Running with Scissors,” which may be one of the ten worst movies I’ve seen in my life. As far as I can tell, Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris may be exactly the same person, trotting out their own childhood in warped dark comedy while being unable to write about anything more accessible or universal.

At this point in my story, you may be wondering why on Earth I subjected myself to a reading from someone I was fairly predisposed against. For one, the tickets were free, through Em’s Princeton student status. For another, I was ready and willing to be proven wrong. Investing an evening in a reading is far less onerous than committing to reading a whole book. Finally, I had a real interest in watching an author ply his craft orally. As someone who envisions a future not only as a writer, but also as a speaker, I was highly curious to see how writers who are of the stature where they can do tours execute them. I think writers should be a lot more like rock stars (sorry, Salinger and Pynchon) and have thought long and hard about doing reading tours, speaking tours, and almost concert-like prose performances. Really, if I spent all the time I spend thinking about being a writer actually writing, I’d be in somewhat better shape.

So I was ready to embrace Mr. Sedaris with an open mind, watch him woo the audience with only a lectern and a microphone, be drawn into his autobiographical world amid uproarious laughter.

Instead, I was greeted by one of the most grotesquely inaccurate caricatures I have ever heard/read. And that was just the opening piece.

Some context should perhaps be provided to illustrate my overall mindset, beyond the open-minded but slightly trepid approach I was taking toward D. Sedaris. I had just eaten a fairly fancy Japanese dinner with Emily and some of her school friends who were to join us. All three friends are New Yorkers and all three seem to desire varying levels of the implied accompanying sophistication. Most all of the dinner conversation thus consisted of comparisons of wines, wineries, eats, eateries, and blocks within the city of New York. There was also extensive discussion of detailed aspects of the program everyone but me present was attending.

I feel I must tread with caution here, because I like all of Em’s friends and I enjoy their company for the most part. But there is something about being party to a discussion of various fine dining establishments in New York City that makes me want to move to Bhutan and go on a lifelong diet of brown rice. New Yorkers have a way of talking about New York not only like it’s the center of the universe, but as though it’s simply obvious to everyone that it’s the center of the universe. And fine dining is somewhere between NASCAR and modern art in my general esteem, both as far as my personal interest and the extent to which I feel it adds value to the world at large. So not only was this conversation a somewhat deadly combination (it’s a bad sign when the thing one relates to most is a discussion of classes one hasn’t attended with professors one hasn’t met), but it put in sharp relief how different Emily and I are from much of the New York consciousness that envelops this distant suburb of same.

Back to Sedaris, reading his first work, which is a lampoon of the worst aspects of the Republican anti-Obama movement, combining the tea-baggers, birthers, and people screaming at town-hall meetings about healthcare. What the lampoon lacked was a shred of compassion, an attempt at understanding, an effort to infuse the slightest humanity in the characters being lampooned. As a result, it fell utterly flat, criticizing nothing by failing to engage a real person. It was the worst kind of straw-man argument, one so self-evidently flimsy that it failed to even stand up as a half-decent scarecrow before falling under its own weight. In an era where most sophisticated writers have at least gotten into explaining why their villains are villainous (bad childhoods, traumatic experiences, etc.), this spoof of Republicans was horrendously amateurish. In fact, the piece inadvertently elicited my sympathy with such people (with whom I in no way agree on the subjects discussed), simply because I was so horrified at what short shrift Sedaris gave them.

Most alienating of all, however, was the crescendous din of hilarity surrounding me on all sides, bouncing off the walls and into my ears like some misplayed note. People certainly came primed and ready to laugh, but at least some of what I heard must have been sincerely elicited by Sedaris’ words. How could anyone find this funny? With each passing phrase and punchline, with its correspondent roars of approval, it became more and more clear to me why Will Farrell is considered a superstar in our culture. The people around me, these were the real idiots.

Of course, sitting through hours of affirmation of a viewpoint one finds insane has a wearing effect over time. I suspect this is what rational Germans must have felt like at Hitler rallies in the 1930’s (not to compare Sedaris and Hitler, but it’s a dramatic analogy, so hey), first horrified by what others found compelling and eventually turning the glass inward on themselves to wonder if there was something wrong with them for questioning what so many others clearly found to be true and right. Ultimately, it comes down to the strength of one’s personal convictions… if one feels sure of one’s own moral compass, the impact is to feel completely alien, almost dehumanized. If one wobbles or has doubts, one ends up giving in to the masses.

I didn’t give in, for I was pretty sure that horrifying stories of people being heartlessly ghastly to each other with no redeeming value or message other than a cheap gag was not something I was ever going to laugh at. The best story by far was one about the slow deterioration of sea turtles captured on the beach by an ignorant boy and their eventual starvation as they refused to eat raw hamburger in a fresh-water tank that was too small for even one of them. This was redeeming only because there were paragraph endings that were not punchlines, but actually offered some lasting value or message about people who are not cartoons. The story was still horrific and still drew out laughs which I couldn’t share, but at least it involved 2.5-dimensional people. Admittedly, however, the only person to which one could really relate was the author’s own avatar, which perhaps illustrates what I fundamentally disrespect about autobiographical fiction.

It was a bit of a relief to leave the show and confer with Emily and friends and find that few to none of them had been among those doubling over in fits of laughter during the performance. (Our seats had all been scattered as we acquired tickets late.) Despite their New York myopia, they were wise enough to see that poking empty shells of alleged people with sticks and chortling at the pain is neither art nor humor. And I felt reassured that while I may be an alien, I am not alone in being one. At least, not in that regard at that particular time.

Still, significant questions loom for me as I contemplate the McCarter Theater poster dubbing Sedaris as “maybe the funniest man alive.” As I labor over my own writing and its long-term goal of helping humanity save itself, the nagging question of whether this species is worth it resurfaces. Or were most of the people pre-programmed, told by enough friends and hearing enough laughter that they amoebically responded with their own throes? Do most crowds cede control of their own judgment mechanisms, looking to experts on stage and affirmation in their accompanying mob?

If nothing else, I must be further driven, if only to offer an alternative that attempts to provoke intense thought about real people rather than automated laughter at scarecrows.

Is that a strange reason to keep 10-15 boxes of very heavy books?

In any event, something I’ve gotten together this week is the resurrection of old debate videos that I have had on VHS for time immemorial (that’s what seven years feels like, at any rate).

I’ll be offering up one of these a week, the first is posted here: on ParliDebate.com, which is developing quite a trove of past debate rounds.

The one/week thing not only makes the releases nice and dramatic, but it’s because Vimeo puts an upload limit on things. The one/week thing will also likely be interrupted when we go on our 2009 Sunset to Sunrise Summer Sojourn, which is currently slated to commence on 7 July 2009. A full schedule of said Sojourn should actually be out sometime this week too.

I really liked the part where I thought I’d have enough time during this month to work on a lot of new web projects and revamping. At this rate, I’ll be lucky if I’ve packed two-thirds of the house by Jake’s wedding.

Or maybe I’m just demoralized today because lifting objects puts me in a bad mood. Always.

If you don’t want to lift your mouse-clicking-finger to go over to ParliDebate.com, here are the Stanford 2002 Finals for your viewing pleasure:

Stanford 2002 APDA Final Round from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.