Mmmmm.

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Fuck Xanga.  I need like a TwitPress.

I use this Tom's of Maine deodorant I bought back in September that makes me smell like I'm sweating oatmeal.


I got my head shaved.  Now the fears I've had since age twelve have been confirmed.  It doesn't want to come back at the temples.


I will fight for your right to jaywalk.


Laminated onto the wall of the one men's stall on the first floor of the Northfield Public Library:

Maybe it's the Clip Art animals and dog poems -- by the sink: "My puppy likes/his bone and ball/But my puppy likes/me most of all!" -- but this place reminds me of my elementary school, the air heavy with antiseptic.  They affixed the soap dispenser to the mirror, which shakes as you push.  There are no paper towels, only a dryer.  These last details don't really have anything to do with my elementary school.  There the soap was pink and you washed it off in big communal latrine trough basin things before drying your hands with towels.  I hated drying my hands, the scratch of rough brown paper against the metal dispenser sparking shivers every time.

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on irony:

I feel that DeLillo's White Noise treads very close to things I've been thinking a lot lately, maybe helps clear a path.  He doesn't talk about irony much explicitly, but it's central to his writing and his analysis -- well, the Murray character's analysis -- of TV illustrates that it is, or requires, the same kind of distancing that I see in irony. 

Irony is active.  It's a process of excusing ourselves from convictions.  We run to it out of fear of banality or pretense, and I can't help but wonder if similar fears motivate my uneasiness about it.  Through it, we create a parallel narrative, aware of our flaws (everyone's flaws, actually) before you mention a thing. 

It's irony as a contemporary instinct that worries me {insert something about postmodernity}.  And I'm not sure what about it, exactly.  Maybe the dishonesty, but dishonesty is such a big word and carries the wrong intellectual and moral baggage.  What I want is not so much a more honest world but a more genuine one. 

And while I write this I have to confront my own ironic impulses.  That first sentence about White Noise sounds stupid, mixes metaphors like it means it (kinda like this alliteration).  The words banality and pretense come off as pretentious.  My sentence structure here isn't all that conversational.  What I write is what I feel like writing, but maybe what I feel like writing results from a need to prove myself, something just below the surface.  I should either come to terms with my pretentious tendencies (as they seem now) or grow out of them.  But instead I waver in the uncomfortable space between attempted sincerity and ironic self-deprecation, fearful dumbing-down, self-censorship.

But maybe it's that discomfort with what I see as pretentious (or banal...?) in what I described as "attempted sincerity" that's important.  It doesn't ring true.  Pretense is a claim to something more than you are (or should {socially constructed} be?), and basically, well, who's banal in their own minds?  The point is once you see some part of you or product of yours as either, it seems inauthentic.  Sometimes we attempt to arrive at truth through irony, or maybe use it to open up the possibility we're always touching truth in some way, but I worry we lose our opportunity for genuine connection in the process.

This isn't all that irony is.  Maybe it can be creative.  When I include that poem from the stall, I'm either being ironic or -- weirder -- nostalgic/cutesy; these are the two options available at this point in my life.  That's not necessarily good, but it might not be as bad as all that, neither.  We have to have some way to express things that are beyond our reach (because they're socialized for people of a certain age, etc.).  And the way we socialize kids is fertile ground for deserved mockery.  But it's the fact this expression has to come with mockery attached -- of what's expressed, the expresser, maybe you the listener -- that makes it a problem.