imagine Jonathan Frantzen. and Oprah and the Book Club. so that the 'Book Club' had all this power over Frantzen's book, sales, reputation and something harder to define. and then Frantzen rejected it. let it be known he despised it. and it began the slow process of mobilizing its outrage and he began to realize how powerful it was and began to backpeddle, though calmly and in a dignified manner.
and Oprah had that power, not by herself but because of the people who watch her show. that's a 'god' there. in its infancy. it creeps me out so bad I can't stand it.
ok
imagine waking up every day to a life that that 'god' was in. was there when you woke up. every day. in its infant unknowingness and all-powerfulness and neediness and all of that. and the way your book sales could turn to millions at the whim of 'it'. all that power over your life though not your book not something external, your being. your survival, the survival of your self, your inner being becoming one thing or another according to 'its' appetite for or disgust with or concern about or anger at or any of the thousand response shadings of that infant thing. and think how you'd really feel about that. how trying to get away from it would make it hate you. how that hatred would feed back on itself in you, how frustrating would it be? and what would you do with that frustration? who would you go to? what would you say? imagine that power all concentrated in people who knew only what Oprah told them or what someone else told them. imagine your fate in the hands of that 'god'.
sometimes I think I'm enduring more frustration for the sustained amount of time I'm doing it, than any other human ever has .
and oh yeah
and then imagine another crowd entirely, like guys in the county jail, guys who don't even read, but watch out of boredom or some low-level sadism, just because there's nothing else on. watch you live your life under the mindless loving eye of that infant deity, that 'god' that has no past, no history, no sense of guilt or complicity, no sense that its existence might be a gambit from another larger, more invisible hand.
frustrating? a little?
and then these little boy scouts with just enough back story to feel heroic when they spit in your face.
living like that is compromise, and seeking death to escape that is compromise. and those are basically the only two choices available.
so yes well I am, a little, frustrated. yes.
I am.

posted by Juke at 3:14 PM [edit]