(quote: Hemingway; video: David Lynch on Ideas)
Last week, I finished the content of Under Fluorescent Light and I've basically spent the days since drinking Glenfiddich and playing SimCity. The book is a collection of short stories. I struggle to describe them beyond that, other than to say that I've tried to make the reader uncomfortable, to make he or she laugh ambivalently, to lose the distinction between the hard-edges of life and the blurry logic of dreams. The work has been referred to as science fiction by several people, but if it is then it is a strain of the genre that has not existed until now. Much thanks to my friends Dale Eisinger (for writing an introduction, typesetting the work, and consoling my nerves on several drunken nights), TWag (for the innumerable hours he's spent pointing out the weaknesses in earlier drafts), and Tyler Bowling (for lending his eyes and hands to the cover design). There is a publishing lag of at least six weeks before hard-copies will be available.
All the grooves are well-worn now, and I can't seem to extract even the most palsied happiness from the mundanity leaking in under the door. No hobbies, no romance, no mendacious comforts. All the things I was supposed to do appear to me now as symptoms for some kind of communicable brain-disease that can only be vaccinated by good books, mood-altering chemicals, hypnagogia, and a discipline for the abstract. A philosophy without consequence is no philosophy at all.
Boise's got hooks in me now. If an offer comes down from academia, I'm in the wind . . .but now I'll miss a whole gang of people that tolerate my habits and do not laugh when I dance and break my heart with their earnest eyes. All part of the plan, supposedly, but there is no plan and I can't predict the state of things six months from now. I can barely see past winter.
