Love & Money

I am reading a terrible book called Love & Money. I began it on the beach and didn't like it. I came back from the beach and kept reading it even though I increasingly liked it less. I woke up today and gave it another go and my dislike almost turned into hatred. I am bored so silly by it that I am skipping pages just to get to the end. And I wonder when did I get so slammed by restless ennui that I cannot even put down a terrible book and say "hey you needn't finish this you know, it sucks and is an unproductive way to spend a gorgeous day." Nope, I just keep reading, hoping, waiting, for something interesting to happen to a crew of wholly unlikeable characters talking non-stop about legal issues that have to do with, you guessed it, love and money. Or at least this jaded author's view of same.

This book is so amoral--and not in a fun dishy way--that it leads me to reflect on topics better left unaddressed, such as what passes for "literature" these days, how hard is it be to write a novel and get it published, what kind of climate is this book reflecting? Thinking if art imitates life, and this is how Americans with love and money are living, maybe I am glad that I am poor in all respects.

As this endless summer draws to its unofficial close, I realize that I am very uneasy with myself. Not quite uncomfortable, but slightly apprehensive, faintly bewildered, a wee bit scared. Curious as to what happened to the goalposts one uses to define one's limits, to point out when we've gone from playing the field to sitting in the stands, to hiding under them, to standing entirely apart from them. I know that I haven't quite lost sight of the stadium yet, but I may be unwillingly travelling further away from it than I intended to. I am not even sure that this is true. Perhaps it is all a matter of perspective.

I am not unhappy. I am tired. Tired of filling in the gaps in my information with flowery prose, designed to conceal my ignorance of cold hard facts. My pencil is worn down and the eraser is a mere nub, but the blue book is unfinished and the bell hasn't rung yet, so I must keep on writing the essay. Again hoping, hoping for that bolt from the blue, for inspiration to strike, for the muse to take pity on my disorganized thoughts and translate them into a coherent tale of derring-do, to get me that much-needed A to send my GPA to its all-time high.

It worries me that maybe I don't even know what it is I want from myself, hence the ever-shifting goalposts that make it difficult to ascertain whether I am spectator or player, sidelines or halftime show. Lately I feel like I am in pieces rather than the whole. Here I am fine, today I am motivated, tomorrow I will accomplish this, last week I did that, and five years ago I was, if not quite whole, wholly different.

One of my cast-in-iron goalposts has always been these mile markers. To breathe deep, to take stock, to reflect on the good and the bad and the ugly. Not to wallow in remembrance but to energize for the days to come. Sometimes these anniversaries equal all or nothing at all. I have met them with laughter and with tears and with a casual shrug. This particular epoch seems very strange by comparison to the hundreds upon hundreds I have been know to observe, if only with my own private rituals.

Because, different I can handle. Better I certainly wish for. Worse bites the big one. But half a decade to show for all my efforts, and I find today, in an ironical twist, that I sit here in the sad quiet forcing myself to read an epoynomous tome that defines for me without a doubt that was then, this is now. And yet I have to hang in there to see hw it all turns out.

Off to finish this piece of crap.