2002-11-01 - 2:39 p.m.

Yesterday -- I forgot to mention this -- my monitor sputtered out in an explosion of sparks and scary-fast clicks, as if in a sympathetic self-sacrifice to save my eyes and my worksoul. (Worksoul shuts down like C3PO after I leave this place and doesn't really power back up until, oh, 11:30 the next morning, after I've braced myself sufficiently to face the day.) But there's an abundance of monitors in this office for some reason, and minutes after that old ViewSonic kicked it, I was trucking back from the machine room with a spankin' new (dude, you're getting a) Dell monitor.

Got the new Skyscraper in the mail at work. That was a genius move on my part, giving them only my work address. All the other mail I get here is just so terrible. Not fun at all. This one, this keeps me entertained between soul-destroying tasks. It also reminds me, hey, you sometimes can write purty good. I was scanning the reviews section for mines, and I came across this line: "Space has a way of framing things." Kinda like "Distance has a way of making love understandable." (That's Wilco, and I didn't hear YHF until after I turned in my reviews and interview. I swear.) Which I saw refuted in bathroom graffiti recently: "Distance has no way of making love understandable." Someone wrote "Amen" under it. God we're self-referential in these parts.

So I like my line. I thought, when I first re-read it after forgetting it, God, that's fucking pretentious and meaningless. But now I like it again. Especially after reading, during a rather masochistic streak, the prose of the Most Pretentious Wannabe Rock Critic on Earth, who also writes for Skyscraper. MPWRCE "reviews" a couple of good albums, but the fact that he likes them makes me question whether I should. The reason I put "reviews" between "quotation marks" is that MPWRCE doesn't actually get around to writing about anything but himself until his word count has almost been spent. It's like he's afraid of the actual music, maan. That and he needs a fact checker really badly. The dick.

I don't shit-talk often so you know this guy deserves it. Actually, I don't know the guy. He might be nice. But his writing makes me angry.