Lockdown had some silver linings for me. I forgot about this event. I was poking around my long-dormant short story collection project and was trying to find some feedback I'd received from a fellow writer I know here in Dallas. The email search surfaced this post about a reading of his work (that I had published on a writing site I was part of at the time). I've copied it to its appropriate spot in my blog's chronology.
The just-the-facts 2023 year-in-review: daniel.industries/2024/01/06/2023-in-review/
Ya'll who get your year-in-review posts out in the same year you're writing about are such overachievers...
"Paging through somebody’s CD book, in the mid-’90s, was the single most intimate activity you could engage in with another human being. It was like drinking beer out of someone’s mouth. Paging through somebody’s CD book was like 75 percent of the way to just making out with them. You might as well make out with them at that point. No modern equivalent."
"Consider the lillies of the goddamn field" might be the best slightly modified quote-as-dialogue ever written. I think about it often.
"...all manner of fanatics thrived in the contemporary chaos, exploiting the frightening complexity of the age to hawk their simplistic narratives, their archaic binaries that brooked no ambiguity"
"My life sounds like a Penderecki tune," she said.
"I like Penderecki," he said.
"But I love him because so much of modern philosophy or commentary or culture just seems to be strange adult individuals making shit up. None of it has any substance or truth, like none of it. Even the ones who seem to be contrarians, you know what I’m talking about? There’s so many of these talking heads and it’s all just…a waste of life. It’s just like pretentious like political or self-help goofballism."
