It Must Have Been The Roses

By now you should be able to tell which computer I am writing posts from - work or home. Home is where I keep all of my family-oriented images. 

Jesus, I thought that I had made a little progress playing Grateful Dead songs. Nope. I tried to go back to them today, expecting to feel as if I had been invited back on tour in '77. But no, instead I was promptly ejected from the stadium parking lot. They can play very smoothly when the skeletons take them.

I probably should not have bought the 12-string guitar. I don't play it much. I should have bought a banjo or a Spanish/classical acoustic. 

My friends are all cracking. The pressures are much and many. I am keeping the extremes of my worries quiet most of the day. As always, it is at night when the mind-forg'd manacles come climbing down the chimney. I look at pictures of naked women to distract myself.

That's not even true. The truth is more banal. I watch series-after-series of adult animation. For a while I was reading well and often, but then I started Knausgård's My Struggle. It lacked something that Houllebecq did not. Knausgård starts to feel like a disciple of someone after a while, maybe a hundred pages. Not someone admirable, either, more like Deepak Chopra. You get the feeling he is trying to resolve something that, in the end, you aren't going to care very much about, and it won't be resolved anyway. You will have spent months listening to someone's intermittently interesting and occasionally fascinating inner monologue, then they'll ask you to leave. 

I could be very wrong - he is a highly regarded writer. 

I became interested in Houllebecq's characters and their circumstances. That is the only thought that I am trying to form. 

I will try to come back and write some more after dinner. We'll see. 

Nope. I came back after dinner, read the above, and surrendered. 

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