Author: Aaron Weber

On the plane, I read The Areas of My Expertise, which was funny, but not really meant to be read straight through. It’s more of a fictional version of Schott’s Miscellany. Which is to say, it’s a fictional reference book that one would never use as a reference anyway.

Because I got my brother a copy of the Complete Calvin and Hobbes book (see also Calvin and Hobbes: The Last Great Comic Strip), which took up more than half my suitcase with its 22-lb, three-volume majesty, I wasn’t able to bring anything else to read. Instead, last night, I rummaged through the nightstand in my parents’ spare bedroom.

They call it the insomnia room, because it’s where my mom sleeps in when my dad is snoring too loudly, and where my dad stays awake if he can’t sleep and wants to let my mom get some rest. So it’s got a neat little pile of soporific reading right next to the bed: one copy each of Gourmet, Martha Stewart Living, Cell, Science, PC Magazine, Architectural Digest, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, all at least six months old. The Architectural Digest is from some time in the last century.

There are also books on cancer and stress management and literary/economic theory, and a short novel about the sole remaining resident of a decrepit rural town in northern Spain. The nearby bookshelves are stuffed with overflow cookbooks, Spanish poetry, and obscure literary theory in roughly equal volume, plus a few children’s books that I think were bought for the now-grown offspring of various friends, but never actually wrapped and given.

I read the article on vintage swizzle sticks from last July’s Martha Stewart and it put me right to sleep.

I read a lot of horrible science fiction when I was in junior high school, as an escape. I loved the way that it could pull me away from a mundane world I hated so much. As I grew older I began to look down on that fear, want to engage more with the world, move away from fantasy and sci-fi. And of course I developed a little taste as well. So when I deign to read genre fiction, I shiver a little, because it reminds me of how much of a loser I was when I was younger. Then I am also reminded of how much of an insufferable snob I have become.

Anyway, the point is that a lot of genre fiction runs on a combination of badly-sewn-together myth and a detailed imaginary world, but some is genuinely good fiction that happens to take place in an incredibly detailed imaginary world. China Miéville writes this sort of thing. Deep themes, good characterization, brilliant turns of phrase (OK, a little too baroque in places, but still very well made).

I read these books and they suck me away into something else and I come up for air a day or two later and think, where have I been?

The Massachusetts unemployment insurance program is administered through a group called DET, which doesn’t seem to stand for anything. Their web page is at detma.org, but their headlines proclaim that they are representing the Division of Career Services/Division of Unemployment Assistance (DCS/DUA). I assume that they are changing their acronym from something along the lines of the Division of Employment Termination.

At least they didn’t call it Mass Unemployment.

Word is that Songs: Ohia frontman Jason Molina’s newer efforts, under the name “Magnolia Electric Company,” just aren’t any good.

But I can’t stop listening to the song Just Be Simple (yes, it’s been in my playlist more or less constantly since September. Megan gets annoyed when I do this, because she doesn’t want to get sick of a song. But I binge.)

The lyrics are all about sticking it out and being strong, knowing that running away from problems doesn’t solve them. Of course, I aspire to feeling that way, but you know I think about getting out and putting a new address on things all the damn time. Usually that address is my grandmother’s farm, where I will become an honest workin’ man.

The song goes on “I ain’t lookin for that easy way out– my whole life’s been about try and try and try to be simple again.” Of course, I’m not trying to be simple. I’m making things incredibly complicated. I’m all about unnecessary complications. Sure, I’d love to cut out some of the things I regard as unnecessary, but that often makes things more complicated rather than less. I just dream sometimes of cutting the excess out, cut and cut and cut until everything is gone and something pure and beautiful is laid bare.

Of course, I know that, in reality, that kind of behavior just leaves you with a bloody mess.

When my grandparents bought that farm back in sixty-some, seventy-some, the guy living on it was basically making his living selling firewood. He lived on what he had: deer, a vegetable plot, firewood, squirrels, rabbits, odd jobs, a beat-to-shit pickup. I doubt he kept his teeth much past forty. Why does subsistence farming sound appealing? No health insurance, no culture, no public transit, bad food, long hours, shopping at Goodwill for work-wear. Yet it is a fantasy for a significant number of office drones and working stiffs, including me.

Grass is greener, I guess.