Insomnia ruminations

As should be gathered by the title and the fruitlessness of my melatonin, I can't sleep and am officially annoyed by this. Again. It's turning into an old story. So you get a blog post in return.

Thoughts:

1) The slate gabfest plugged an article which I cannot find, but sounds freaking great: The breakdown of all sounds considered's top albums list. Which, long story short and to further prove my disdain, simply reminds me of the middlebrow banality of the entire NPR franchise. Half the time I think Congress would be doing the country a favor if they followed through on the cutting of the damned funding, if only for the fact that people might actually experience

2) I made a batch of chili last night, which should have turned out delicious and actually was quite tasty, but the damned thing smells like someone upchucked in the frakkin soup. Now, I don't know if this is a bad beer experiment or what, but it's overall quite annoying. Which leads to point three:

3) The fridge in the apartment here is actually not working. Seriously. The freezer is absolutely fine, but the fridge? It's noticeably cooler in the kitchen than there. And we've had the windows shut in this nor'easter.

4) I need some more coffee right now. But I need sleep even more. Enjoy this, enjoy the nothingness of this post, nihilism sucks, creation ex nihilo is a lie (but the truth isn't that compelling, either). Later, kids.

One last thing, and yes, I know this is a postscript but I'm still sleep-optional at this point:

Monday morning one-off

I'm procrastinating getting ready for work, and so in doing I stumbled on this article in the NYtimes: "A Quest to Read a Book a Day for 365 Days." Okay, so this is admirable: basically, this woman has decided to read a book every day for a year. I'm cool with that, to a point. But really, browsing her blog (Read All Day), her assessments are largely superficial. How many book are "beautiful," "wonderful," "one of the best"? Really, while I appreciate what this is, the act of reading, reading a piece of art should elicit a response beyond just the "hey, look, I'm reading."

Now, my father used to read quite a bit as well. Mack Bolan, Marcinko, the occasional Ludlum. Which is fine also, but nobody is going to equate this to reading of depth. These are novels designed for consumption, serving much the same purpose as a big loud explosiony hollywood blockbuster, and should be considered as such. What's my point here? Basically, reading a lot can dangerously lead to treating all books as crap.

To my avid readers out there, take stock. I'm talking (somewhat) to you. Not to complain, but mainly to say that there's more to a novel that sheer rampant consumption is not going to help. It's like physics: every action has its consequences. Reading is still a slow activity, that's where it gets its power. Reading fast is just wasting time.

Hmmm...this post felt like a waste of time. I'll revise it when I think of a point later.