fly to carry each his burden

There has been an unexpected change of plans, and it looks as though I won't have to spend the remainder of March proofreading. I will likely get started on Dinosaurs of Mars, instead. Anything at all is better than more proofreading.

Yesterday was quite decent as days off go. My days off usually go sort of askew and frustrating, so yesterday was a nice exception. It was also the sort of day that makes me laugh at things like that LJ "50 movies in a year" challenge. First, we made a 1:40 matinee of The Host. It was awesome. Someone called it Jaws meets Little Miss Sunshine, but I think it's a lot more like Godzilla meets Little Miss Sunshine. Anyway, I was very pleased.

Unfortunately, then we stopped by Videodrome and rented Eragon, because I just had to see for myself. Gods, what a dull, lifeless, unimaginative film. What artless crap. Right off the bat, I could not stomach the flavourless Dawson's Creek stench of Edward Speleers. Could they have ever found a blander countenance to foist upon the world? At least Jeremy Irons was pretty. There was hardly any John Malkovich at all. I think he was ashamed to appear in more than four scenes. This is the worst fantasy film I've watched since I tried to watch the abomination that the SCF made of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Wizard of Earthsea. Oh, sure, Sienna Guillory was hot, but that hardly made up for the overall crap factor (OCF) of Eragon. And then there was that gawdsawful Avril Lavigne song over the closing credits. I suppose I could wonder if the books are any better, but I suspect I'd only be wasting a perfectly good bit of wondering. Seeing Eragon was the sort of disheartening experience that makes me never want to write another word. Especially if the Christopher Paolini books are even half this bad. Maybe that's counter-intuitive. Maybe seeing crap ought to make me want to write something better. It doesn't, though. It leaves me with a nasty "why bother" feeling. After all, I've spent the last fourteen years writing stuff that's better.

But, fortunately, Netiflix had brought us Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny, which, it turns out, is the perfect antidote for Eragon. I made myself ill with the laughter.

At some point, we also finished Cannery Row and began reading Sweet Thursday.

And the digital camera seems to have died. The damned thing's only three goddamn years old. Not even. What good is all this technology if it breaks down so quickly and so quickly becomes obsolete? I bet anything it would be far cheaper for us to buy a much better digital camera — buy a better one for less than we paid for the one that just expired — than it would be to have this one fixed. That's just the sort of unspeakably vile world we live in.

Lately, I find myself in the mood to go Luddite again. No technology post-1945. That sounds about right. No more cellphones or digital cameras or computers of any sort, no more goddamn videogame consoles, no scanners or fax machines or iPods. No CDs or DVDs. And no fucking internet, word wide web, LJ, MySpace, Blogger, Amazon.com hooptedoodle. I'll write on an old Royal typewriter or with pen and paper. There's a lot to be said for pen and paper. I'm at least half serious. I'm sick of all this mindless electronic consumption in the name of Faster and "Better". Fuck faster and "better." Fuck all the plastic, the silicon, the petroleum by-products molded into chic designs. Fuck LCD screens. Fact: I'll never write a book half as good as Ulysses. Fact: James Joyce did it without a goddamn laptop.

It's like all this magical 21st-Century medicine that no one can actually afford.

I suspect this will pass and soon I'll be drooling over MacBook Pros again, which is an awful shame.