I think maybe you can get insomnia from some people the way cats can give you allergies. How else do you explain?
Probably it’s after midnight and I’m up watching the Twilight Zone, the most comfortable spot on the couch but my back’s all crooked. I really want to move, realign myself except he’s got his head in my lap, snoring like some kind of small furry animal. That passed-out kind of heavy, and what can I do. Sit awhile, gently fucking up his hair, feeling like there isn’t anything left to think about.
The day before was orientation for accepted students at DU. So exciting I don’t even care about adding to my loans. One of the professors is apparently crazy about indexing. My people, at last.
Into the For Beginners series lately. Sure the editing and design is kind of lousy and Marcos Mayer launches some new and terrible assault against the correct usage of commas on every other page of the Anarchism book, but overall they’re interesting. This is the stuff I never would have passed a class on during undergrad: Plato, Structuralism and Poststructuralism. But both of these are awesome. Plato actually covers Socrates through Aristotle, and Ancient Greek history as well – so you get the basics of all the teachings plus context. The Structuralism, etc. is pretty much for breakaway semi-intellectual urban rednecks like myself, who’ve read enough of Orwell’s essays to appreciate the ways the structure of a language can influence/limit thought but didn’t know how to correctly pronounce Claude Levi-Strauss’ name.
Which brought me to Anarchism. The thing that annoys me about this one (aside from the rampant crimes against grammar) is the tone. I mean, it’s not a school of thought clearly broken down by era and philosopher, with theories and main arguments outlined against just enough historical context to ground you. It’s more like an adventure novel with Anarchy as the hero. Of course the bits about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are especially appealing, but the tone is just preachy enough to bother me.
Still. One of the regulars came over to me the other day at work to show me The Perks of Being a Wallflower, ask if I’d read it. Now I’m thinking of what Charlie’s teacher told him about reading Ayn Rand: be a filter. So I guess I just have to be a filter with this one. And add TPOBAW to the list of books I need, my old copy’s so long gone I’m not even sure what happened to it, or when. But I was excited to talk about it, and now I wish I had it to flip through. Because the other thing about the boy on the couch is that sometimes he makes me wish I was a fucking existentialist or something, but I know enough to know I’m not wired that way, and to be grateful for it.
