Your Body is a Shattered Hellscape

So I engaged in the serious task of manscaping today. It was a nightmare. To sum it up, I no longer have the nose hairs of a mad Victorian industrialist. My sinuses now flow free and unfettered, visually glorious in their lack of hair. Another thing about such an activity is that it is painful. The act itself is, in essence, ripping the parts of myself that I feel others might find offensive off. Of myself. Which is, in essence, fucking ridiculous, because people will find anything offensive anymore, especially my own leering and bat-like visage. WHY MUST I CHANGE MYSELF FOR YOU PEOPLE? Oh right, because I have body issues. Continuing on.

I was speaking with Cathleen (never Catherine!) today, talking about specificity of studies, to wit; what can you do with a BA in English? It's really bullshit, the idea that your area of speciality makes you uniquely suited to a particular path in life. Not that it's false, no, just that it's bullshit. We live in an age where investment bankers basically investment bank, and view that as the sum of their lives. Authors write and write and write (horribly in some cases, DON DELILLO), and never really do anything else. We seem to have a kind of diversification caste system out there, where movement from one area to another is hardly possible. Angelina Jolie, maybe, and her gestalt Celebrity/Activist/Attractive Freak is a good example, or Philip Levine's Autoworker/Poet thing. For others, though, our areas of speciality are doing us no favors.

Consider Wal-Mart, or nearly any other chain store. These are buildings constructed by cold efficiency and logic, where the whimsy and wonder and other costly architectural super-fucking-fluousnesses (LOVE SAYING THAT OUT LOUD) have been surgically extracted by the cold scalpel of, I guess, the trolls in accounting, leaving behind a raftered box with an entry, and exit, and a lot of space. An entire division of art turned, basically, into a dvd player. They're structures that, one can only hope, would have never come into being if Sam Walton was able to see the visual atrocities that his sons inflict on the world at large.

Also, guess what? You just lost the game!

Regardless, one must consider what lies always beyond themselves, what happens when sculptors start painting or plumbers start singing or when bloggers start self editing (answer: neurosis). To this end, I long ago made a personal vow to try things that I know are oftentimes uncomfortable to do.

Which I guess places me back at square one, ripping out my own nosehair for your aesthetic pleasure. I hope you're happy with all the enlightenment I'm projecting your way, interblags. Catch y'all later.