Nocturnal Transmission.
Finished Zero History by William Gibson tonight. Took me a good goddamn three months to wade through. Which is funny thinking about. On one hand, three months seems like an inordinate amount of time to finish a novel. On the other hand, the amount of occurrences that have built up since September seem voluminous.
Massive.
Scaling.
The first three months of reading was dictated by school schedules. Or girlfriend schedules. Or if I’m being truthful, playing too many video games and slacking off online masturbating schedules. Yeah kid, you know, those schedules. The last week of the novel consumption was dictated by lack of desire to leave the Gibson-generated universe. A reluctance to bid adieu to a cast of characters that I first: sort of liked. That I second: felt to be flat and thin approximations for cool ideas. And thirdly: I loved, and loathed to leave.
But such is the way things go. If we’re all just people passing by, what does that make fictional people? Vastly different than us, or vastly similar? And if you really want to bum out, I have a feeling Hamlet is going to be hanging around a lot longer than the majority of us.
Swell guy, too. Sort of an Emo Kid, but he’s dealing with some shit.
Zero History, like the rest of Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy is painfully sleek. Gibson used to predict the future in novels such as Neuromancer. Now he busies himself with predicting the present. Pointing out the technologies not bubbling up down the road, but technologies bubbling up in the nooks and crannies of our culture. His universes gleam with coolness.
His characters are well dressed, snappy, and persistently on the cusp of something. Chasing the next big moment. I always pause to realize how much I’d love to be one of his females. Intelligent, attractive, and riding the wind. The next moment is filled with a realization that I’m a twenty-seven year old male with acne and poor fashion taste, and I embrace the impossibility of it all. But there I am three pages, later so desperately wanting to transmute my existence.
It doesn’t happen.
Alas.
So Zero History is done, and there’s a month left out of break. I think I’ll read some more. My conscience has been bubbling up lately, burping up into the forefront. I don’t read enough. I don’t write enough. I slap my fingers across keys all damn day, and seldom do I really think its worth anything. Some sort of electrical charge is zapping up my fat brain mush when I play that fifth round of Black Ops. It barks, Douche, try and think. Forget that I just finished an entire semester of graduate school. Polished it off with a twenty-five page paper.
I’m having a hard time justifying staring at a monitor when I could be staring at leaves. Maybe that’s just how it goes. Moderation is the key to everything, but when you’re an overeating caffeine junkie who masturbates to the point of compulsion, moderation is an Elusive Woman. The most elusive.
Transmission out, carry on.
