the future is coming, the future is coming

I think what I need to do is hire a hooker (but not a really skinny weightless one) to just lie on top of me when I get hit with anxiety and insomnia. I read in someone’s blog that this was a trick farmers use with livestock, but I cannot verify this with Google. Either way, it helps me a lot.

I wrote my poem-a-day while socializing last night, an amazing feat of ignoring the sound of giggling and Rachel Maddow long enough to try to get creative about my feelings about immigration law. It’s weird when friends do laptoppy things right next to each other.

On the radio, long discussions about e-books. I don’t think anyone’s going to be challenging my ability to read paper books for as long as I should choose (though I’m betting they will get more expensive, and it might be harder to find particular titles In Paper, unless more services pop up to print & ship books on demand, kind of like Netflix-ish). Anyway, I still get bummed because I think about libraries and bookstores and how many good times I’ve head in them, and I have this Luddite worry that they will all turn into rooms full of people interacting with computer screens and not smell musty at all. And you know some e-readers don’t even paginate? What is a page, anyway, in the digital world? Just an arbitrary division of text into manageable segments. At least when we do that on web pages, we use some kind of logic. But when you quote your favorite author in a research paper, how are you going to cite "52 percent of the way through The Last Unicorn"?

Okay, my friend says, my ancestors used to hang out in vomitoriums and were very attached to them. Okay, I say, I’m 24 and already a dinosaur.

I get excited, too, about the digitization of the world. I’m primarily a words person, but I think about how visual and audio art could synch up more perfectly with the written word to make someone else’s creativity a completely different experience for consumers of art. To the point where we’re going to look at today’s online poetry mags in a museum some day and laugh at how flat and quaint they are in comparison. I hope there’s still a market for people who only know how to write, though. Also, I hope I can eventually have a slim volume of my own work, in paper, before we’re done with dead trees. No one has to buy it, I just want to wave it around.