"Reimaging" this blog.

Goodbye spontaneity, hello more consistent and perhaps better posts. I’ve decided to start writing things offline and then posting later on. I think it will help keep this from becoming a zombie blog [not in the cool flesheating way] and also help me to avoid the “can’t get a job” broken record type of posts.

So…I’m reading Chuck Klostermann. I have a complicated relationship with his work. I love reading it….he writes funny, smart, cultural analysis that doesn’t take itself too seriously and he always knows when to slam on the brakes before it becomes dry and academic. My problem is that I am jealous, because in some ways, we are similar. He is the me that might have been. Okay, that sounds crazy. But we have similarities that cause me to dislike myself [but not him…I realize this is how homicidal stalkers sound, and once again I am glad that this blog is more or less anonymous, at least on a casual basis.]

In reality, we have no similarities other than growing up in isolated small towns, and even then we grew up in totally different regions. He was genuinely isolated, growing up in North Dakota. I was more culturally isolated, growing up in rural Oklahoma. There were plenty of other people around, I just didn’t have much in common with most of them [or at least I thought so at the time. I’m starting to believe that you can take the boy out of the rural area where most people are content to just get by, but you can’t take the…well, you know.] I suppose that when I was a teenager and imagined myself as an adult, I saw myself as a writer living in some big city someplace, spending my nights having dinner with smart, funny people, and this is how I imagine life for Chuck Klostermann. He would probably be amused by that, because it’s similar [in a writerly, geeky way] to his [and my] imagining the lifestyles of Motley Crue, etc., during the Eighties. He’d be amused, and then he would probably see about getting a restraining order.

Of course, during my late teenage years my image of “real city life” was influenced by the old intro for SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE back in the late 1980s.

Anyway, read some Chuck Klostermann. Read FARGO ROCK CITY, SEX DRUGS AND COCOA PUFFS, or whatever else you can find. Ttwo amusing thoughts from his most recent collection EATING THE DINOSAUR: 1. It’s interesting how ABBA was basically Swedish women having to sing songs in English that many times contained Latin themes. 2. Football [the American kind] is the only sport that undergoes radical changes in how it is played on a regular basis. He says it would be like if the rules of golf suddenly allowed people to tackle their opponents when on the green. Every decade some coach gets a crazy new idea about how to do things, and eventually some aspect of that crazy idea is adopted by everyone [even when almost everyone disparages the crazy new idea at first] or at the very least, everyone has to prepare for the fact that the crazy new idea is now common practice. And I find myself going on and on about football again, so I will stop.