Sad Sack.

Here's the line that appeared in my head the other day:

Reading too much Kerouac
has turned me into a sad sack

It's true. I've been reading a bunch of Kerouac stuff lately, mostly re-reading old stuff that I've read a few times before, biding my time until the new DFW book comes out on tax day. I've also been watching and listening to Kerouac interviews that I've found on Youtube and the rest of the internet. Most of them are pretty sad, because he's usually pretty drunk, especially the interviews from the 60's. The ones from the 50's are pretty good, though. He comes across as extremely shy, and a little drunk, and sad. And egotistical. I found one audio interview from it sounds like around 1958 or '59 where Ben Hecht is interviewing him, and that one was pretty interesting. It sounds a bit like Hecht was mocking him a little bit.

The internet has made my relationship with authors a strange thing, because until its invention, I would read a lot of books and have no real idea what the author looked like or sounded like or acted like. They were entirely mysterious beings who could speak in my head, with my voice, with words that were not mine. Pretty powerful stuff. Now I can watch videos of DFW or Kerouac on Youtube and see that they were not, in fact, otherwordly beings but just normal people, with voices that sound entirely different from mine and their own weirdnesses. It's powerful to watch videos of them, powerful in a different way, and definitely much sadder. Sadder maybe because they're dead and it's always sad to watch videos of dead people, but sadder because they're so normal, and their normalness makes the things they wrote seem that much more brilliant. Who knows. Whatever. Nothing. Nevermind.

Jeannie and I had a damn productive day today. Rented a truck, loaded up our scrap metal, took it to the scrap metal recycling joint, got piz-zayed (paid), headed to the Home Depot, (ate a Home Depot hotdog), bought 20 sheets o' drywall and some lumber, came home and unloaded it all, ate a quick dinnersnack, and framed up the ceiling in the back bedroom. We were busting ass mostly because in the middle of the day I proposed that we bust ass today and then take tomorrow off. So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna take tomorrow off and maybe head out to some museums and spend a nice day together out and about.

That sounds freakin' wonderful to me.

Remember when I used to eat like 6 hotdogs a day? That was fun.