� John Darnielle, in the liner notes to the Mountain Goats album "Full Force Galesburg"

I was driving back from some errands this afternoon when it came to me unbidden, the perfect title for someone�s yet-to-be-written expos� of Seattle�s self-congralutatorily self-validating ethos of lowest-common-denominator intellectual conformity and politeness above all: "Dog Culture Killed My Youth."

I am a genius!

I am not feeling so miserable at all today. There was kind of a lot I wanted to get to in this entry, I thought, and although presently it is lost in my post-gym endorphin haze, I�m hoping things will pick up once I start typing. I am listening to the new Shins album, and did anyone else notice that as soon as I started making feints towards writing about how and why during the past year I�ve felt estranged from music, I immediately went on an egregious tear of acquisitiveness? I don�t know whether this represents cowardice or fighting back, avoidance of an issue or rejection of a considered hypothesis. This one is passable, I suppose, but if someone else had put it on and made me guess what I was listening to, I don�t think the Shins would have been in my top three guesses for the first three songs. A harmonica solo? Hmm. Good mood is partly hangover from hanging out, at the Clem Snide show, with Mrs. Roboto last night. I have decided that she is in the top two of nonjudgmental people I have ever met (the champ is here) and so I resolve to make the hanging-out a regular feature of my social life. Like, I am unemployed and all, yawn, and the reactions of most of my cohort tend towards either a hectoring, mother-hen-like "What are you going to *do*?" � specifics are then demanded, along with a list of what positions at what companies I have applied for in the past x amount of time, including summaries of each cover letter � or warnings that come from the nexus of concern and pity and therefore hector me likewise, "Do you realize how long it�s been since you�ve done anything but monkey work, do you realize what that looks like on your resume and how your entire career is in jeopardy?" (Realization, check. But what can I do about it? The matter is wholly outside my purview, and my getting torqued up about my tanked career isn�t going to change that. If I could make someone give me a job, believe me, I would have done it already.) But with Mrs. R. it goes more like this. Her: So how�s it going, how�s the job search? Me: I still can�t get anyone to hire me, I keep getting automated thank-you-for-your-interest-we-are-adding-you-to-our-database e-mail replies. Her: Ooh, that sucks. Oh well. Shall we have another drink? It is such a relief to me, it is a tonic to the troops to be treated like a normal human being who reads and writes and cooks and puts on lipstick and goes to shows and is not above a medium-sized helping of gossip and who happens not, at press time, to be holding down a J-O-B. When I am with Mrs. R. I feel a little bit like I am on a date with myself, the unlectured-at and potentially vivacious version of myself from which, most of the time, the world that�s too much with me prevents me from being. Last night in particular, at some point I said out loud my fear that I�d never find a job again, and then there was this wonderful moment where she started laughing � it was apparently that ridiculous to her � and she said, "Of course you will!" and I felt totally at the mercy of her practicality and also like that was a pretty damn good place to be. After the show she gave me a ride home and I completed the trifecta and, truth be told, I slept better than I have in weeks. Today, errand-ing, I listened to "Masher" maybe five times in a row and I came to believe, also in the endorphin haze but that�s not the whole story, that there was something out there that I was capable of figuring out. It reminded me of last year when I watched "Spring Forward," that is of course if you can factor out the fucked-upness. And yesterday before I went out had been one of those terrible, rending Mondays during which at various points I managed to convince myself for at least several minutes each that (1) 850 calories on some combination of cardio machines was a reasonable daily benchmark for me; (2) I should try to get down to to 110 pounds by my birthday; (3) I�d be less ugly with brown eyes rather than there�s-no-hazel-in-Washington green so I ought to look into colored contact lenses ASAP; (4) if I didn�t manage to get a non-dumb-secretarial job within the next six months, an adequate punishment/due self-effacement would be never letting myself write � diary, essays, reviews, etc. � again. Etc. Ugh. And look, today I�m fine. It doesn�t take a genius to figure out one big reason why.

Also, I�ll confess, I like Mrs. R. because as far as I can tell she�s the only person in town besides me who keeps up with those snarky NYC blogs � "What is Gawker?" asked gay publishing-exec Manhattan transplant Terry last week, which to me is sobering proof that Seattle will get me too lest I remain eternally vigilant � and this means that almost as soon as she joined me at the bar she gave me a tip of the hat. OK, this might come off as bragging but truly I mean it only as the recounting of fact and in any case I�ll skim over it as background. A few weeks ago I wrote an entry that got linked to at TMFTML and then picked up by an influential few of the people who also hang on that hieratical sourpuss�s every word and then by the Big G and for a few days my diary�s hits were absolutely through the roof and although my fifteen minutes are over the hits have leveled off at a somewhat higher level than before the linkfest and there are people who two weeks ago in terms of internet presence and/or real-world credibility I would have paid money to touch the hems of their garments and if only for that quarter hour I was known to them, I did something and other people noticed. It knocked me out. End of brag, beginning of same old lame old neuroses: the nice people who sent mail and said Ha ha and good job about an entry that actually is a big fluke, since most of the time I forgo the snark in favor of narcissism and self-flagellation and domestic minutiae � I have let them down, I will make them disappointed in me! I owe them an apology, I should bust out the snark more often. But how can I do that, when my New Yorkers don�t hit the 98122 mailbox until Friday or sometimes even Saturday (but hey, lady, and thanks for thinking of me) � I am such a rube and such a peon, it was impossibly hubristic of me to do what I did as if I could be in the same league as the other people who do it and do it so well. (But the thing is I didn�t mean to. I was in a bad mood and I was cross about the exceptionally shitty body of work contained in that week�s issue, and I was blowing off some steam before I went to bed. So is that all right then?) Then again, shit, I did it. And what, like I am doing anything else these days? There are things I don�t like about the possibility of having something going that�s more like a blog than a diary, for instance when something especially blogworthy happens everyone is all over it within minutes and it seems as though one is obliged not merely to provide some original and always snarky comment or to ground it within juicy/poignant personal experience but also to have read and digested all the other bloggers� comment/experience and, as soon as possible, to annotate that as well. Isn�t it an awful lot of pressure? And if you�re not going to be posting anything to your site for a few hours, it�s considered good form to apologize. To apologize! Maybe I don�t have very good manners after all, because I don�t want to do that. No offense, and you know I love you all deeply, but there�s an extent to which you can go screw yourselves, this bitch is mine and mine alone. What I�ve liked about the di is how free-form it is, free from the barest obligation to acknowledge that which is external to it. (Again: cowardice or fighting back?) I write when I feel like it and bag out when I don�t, the action picks up where I decide it does and peters out ditto. I wrote on Friday that I was going to Vancouver and if I never tell anything about that trip, it does not constitute a violation. To me, this is the lush life.

On the other hand, when I didst drink from the beaker of however fleeting and however anonymous recognition, I liked it. Who wouldn�t have liked it? I have sat here and flailed and barked and bit at my collar partly to keep myself from getting bored � the JournalCon lifestyle is not my cup of kibble � and to reaffirm my self-rationale in my environment�s climate of polite indifference. Maybe it�s different if your environment is more hospitable to you and what you individually have going on � maybe your environment takes for granted that you do have something going on so that you don�t have to waste so much energy howling at the moon about it � oh, hell, I don�t remember where this sentence was going. I�m so frustrated most of the time. My inner life is lonely. I live in a town where critical response is not differentiated from condescension and, if you�re not condescending about the right things at the right time � in the Stranger this week, there�s a capsule review that says, "If you don�t like [this film], you�re an asshole" � then you must be a mean person. (For this I went to college?) I guess this is the trade-off about New York, you pay two grand a month to live in a box just like the article said but you get a potential audience of thousands across the table from whom to declaim. And understand, I am the *least* practitioner of criticism, I recognize that I barely deserve claim to the noun. I�m not setting myself up as a paragon. I�m closer to a kneebiter. I got no academic credentials. I don�t know what "smack" is. Yet look, it�s me who�s going out of my mind from mediocrity � this should not be so, this is science fiction! Why are standards so low? Why is there no surly pillow-fighting blog with Seattle HQ? Is the Stranger the only snark-pusher in town? It is mind-crushingly depressing. At least once I day I fantasize about escaping to a land I once knew that compared to Seattle is an intellectual paradise: central Pennsylvania, practically in Amish country. That is depressing too. So all I am saying, in this roundabout way for which I apologize, sorry � but you are listening to me � is that if someone in Seattle did want to come out and start snarking in a publicly accessible forum, tweaking scenesters and calling bullshit on huggable inanities maybe even under her real name, the competition is not exactly fierce. That�s all. That�s what I am thinking about. Capable of figuring out vs. capable of doing. Jury's still out. Jury is feisty.

Please, for the love of all that is good and holy, if you know anyone in Seattle doing anything that I should know about, let me know, send the URL. Having to retract everything I�ve said here would be one of the happiest days of my life. And then, whoever is the boss of the URL in question: I will stalk you.

And one more thing. You don�t get to say, "If you hate it so much, why don�t you leave?" Because do you know what? I mean this in the nicest way possible, but it�s responses like that one that help prove my point. So don�t go there. Help me instead.

I wanted to get to that Dan Savage interview at Media Bistro and possibly bitch about a certain ass-chapping Seattle tradition I�ve had just about enough of, but it�s late and I want to read my book and anyway this is what they call a logical stopping point. Tomorrow � I�m only going running tomorrow and not to the gym, then a yoga (Pilates? I forget) class in the evening, then, HELLS yes, drinks with long-lost scholarly Vanessa at Linda�s. Vanessa, will you bring the extra set of bacon shack housekeys? Thursday should I play poker again? Can�t decide, I think I should maybe study ze Latin instead. Friday something�s up with the Young Englishmen, and Saturday is a possible mushroom-hunting expedition and dinner at the Roboto residence in majestic Ballard. Eventually things will be all right. Of course they will. How could they not?

Less meta- tomorrow too. Promise.

Kiss me, son of God. I'm easy.