after a dramatic gesture this morning, i'm again toeing the waters of my blog. (sorry for the momentary lapse - if i can fling myself headlong into the icy waters of the atlantic in may and october, then surely i can handle the lukewarm puddle that is the blogosphere...right.)

anyway, get this: i went to bed last night at 8:45. that's right. 8:45. a geriatric bedtime, you say? fine. call me sophia petrillo. but i was tired and i'm reading a book that's so.damn.good.

wenz's dad lent it to me - after much hesitation, i relented (okay, he pushed the book into my hands while i was sitting at their kitchen table). it's not that he doesn't make good recommendations (wenz's dad, bill, is essentially my second father at this point, and happens to be a very smart guy)...it's just that lately he's been trying to get me to read books about the historical beginnings of household items like screws and salt.

moving on.

i found myself holding chuck klosterman's killing yourself to live. klosterman's a rock writer for spin magazine, and can somehow make a marvelous turn on intimidating topics like death for the sake of art. he writes in a tangible fashion, installing mental footholds on obscure theories of his own invention. anyone who can clearly articulate his/her hypotheses about life's great mysteries is just neurotic enough to have put thought into them - any reader with entertainment ADD will appreciate this. another noteworthy detail - throughout klosterman makes musical references that bill is planning on downloading and compiling into a sort of soundtrack to the book. it's going to be amazing. i recommend STRONGLY.

since klosterman is pretty much a pop culture encyclopedia, he doesn't stop with physical descriptions of the women in his life - they've all been wrapped up neatly in two or three song references. for someone who's considering surgical ipod implantation, this is extraordinarily helpful. (thanks to someone on toxicuniverse.com for extracting this paragraph from the book - i live in a cube, so my clandestine novel reading isn't as clandestine as i'd thought. oops.)

klosterman writes:

"If Dianne is Dolly Parton's Jolene and Lenore is a fusion of the Big Bopper's libido with Nikki Sixx's scariest wet dream, Quincy is akin to the girl in Ben Folds Five's 'Kate,' multiplied by the woman described in Sloan's 'Underwhelmed,' divided by the person Evan Dando sings about in the Lemonheads' slacked up, Raymond Carver-esque ballad 'My Drug Buddy.' And I realize these are obscure fucking references, but some people demand obscurity."

that's love. if someone's artistic vision is to make you into a musical formula...man. swoon. add that to the list of girlish aspirations.