2023-03-09 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Thursday 🗓 Date: March 9, 2023 📅 Week: Mar 6 – Mar 12, 2023

That’s it, I’m drinking. It’s over for you motherfuckers.

I honestly don’t really know why I’m drinking at the moment. I was reading Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You, which is wonderful so far, and the characters made some maragaritas and that sounded wonderful. I went to the supermarket downstairs but was too lazy to squeeze limes and get out the curacao for this, so I just bought margarita mix instead. First of all, margarita mix is so fucking weak, it sucks. It doesn’t have any of that actually-good lime taste. They just make the inside of your mouth have this disgusting film that makes me want to die.

I Have Some Questions For You is good, but one thing I noticed was that whenever I read mentions of things in the real world, I cringed. Interestingly, this wasn’t the case for Wolf in White Van, which didn’t reference that many real world things but was solidly set in a contemporary world. Perhaps it’s because WIWV does bring you into a very particular slice of the world. It pulls you into small-batch role-playing games, bands that never made it big, gunshot victim support groups. IHSQFY is mentioning Paw Patrol and iPads, which made me feel a little icky. But other things, like mentioning Rita Hayworth, didn’t. Maybe it’s just the technology part of it for me. It’s not that I don’t want to pretend technology doesn’t exist, it’s — well, actually, that’s not entirely true.

You know, I’ve been leaving this painting up on my computer monitor all week partially because I’m going to continue writing about it, but also partially because it actually does the representation of technology well. It shows a bar full of people in their own intimate conversations, dancing, arms around each other, eyes passing over in malaise and interest and insecurity and lust, and then in the middle of all of this is one man alone on his phone, the light beaming under him. I love that — it’s quietly beautiful.