Thursday, January 31, 2002
Sleepy sleepy. I stayed up late working on an internship application and now I’m all sorts of drowsy at work. And there’s little I can do about it. My truck isn’t here, so I can’t drive somewhere or go take a short nap. Sugar and caffiene seem to hold the key to my productivity today, though my attempts to read just a few minutes ago left me nodding off on the sofa downstairs. Just not comfortable sleeping in public yet. The book might’ve had something to do with it: Brenna sent a couple e-mails to be about Michel Foucault, a philosopher she had to quickly familiarize herself with one weekend, and now I’m kind of rediscovering the guy by reading his treatise on the changing nature of punishment called “Discipline and Punish.” Good stuff, but a tad heady to get into while drowsy. The first few pages, though, are perky: They describe the process of torturing to death a man who killed the French King during the 18th c. Poking with red-hot prods, the tearing off of flesh with big pliers, pouring molten lead into various wounds and orifices, and an evening-long quartering process that ends up being quite messy (even for a quartering) — that kind of stuff. Mm. Coffee.
So, I’ve got about five minutes of at-office lunch time left to misuse. Nothing’s really happening on the web that I care to have on my screen near a public space. I gather that a Pakistani group is doing what they can to help the economy by giving some Wall Street Journalist Daniel Pearl great material for a book that could end up on the NTY Bestsellers list and possibly be produced as an action flick by Jerry Bruckheimer. Provided they (the Pakistanis) don’t kill him (Pearl) first. But, all-and-all, it’s good to see we can work together to try and make a more entertaining future for those of us desperately seeking escape so we can stop thinking about how working eight-hour-days for someone else for the majority of your life is, at its core, sad as fuck. A Bruckheimer interpretation of the Daniel Pearl Saga would make for a much more worthwhile evening in front of a screen than listening the the latest State of the Union speech did, for sure. Bush can’t speak well. That slow cadence: that’s not for effect. Well, it sort of is. It’s a mask of his fundamental speaking deficiency that happens to sound kind of dignified in a Barbara Jordan slow-and-solid sort of way. But let’s not kid ourselves. The speeches make no sense and, more importantly, the actual information conveyed can be summed up neatly in two sentences. (Play that game on your own.) For the eight hundred political “thinkers” out there on TV, radio, and in the newspaper: stop trying to interpret and lend meaning to this garble. Its specifically intended to be quite meaningless. You know why as well as I do. The American Public doesn’t actually need to know what’s going on in the government and trying to explain issues to the general mass would just lead to misinterpretation and would require background information and thinking that most of us just have not done. It would create more problems than solutions. Better to just tell us we’re doing great and get off the stage, save us our god damn time and let’s go do something else because if George Bush is going to fuck us, ain’t nothing we can do about it now.
