sucking in a smoke screen.

i just finished reading this book somewhere around 3:30. it took me forever to get through the damn thing. it wasn't so much for the length, i guess, though it was pretty tightly packed text, small size. around four hundred twenty some odd pages. i just have had a job. i love reading, and now that i have all these books, i figured i should get my ass in gear and try to at least whittle down the number to single digits. it won't happen. but it's worth putting effort into.

a lot of times, the title doesn't ring a bell, but the author does. and it's for hilarious reasons. this guy and this book is the one that went on the oprah-coaster. first, she puts it on her list, and it gets insane acclaim, and then the book ends up being debunked, leaving oprah sort of discredited.

now, if i were following this whole thing a little bit more as it happened, i might be able to fine tune this story a little bit more but as i understand it, this book is supposedly a memoir which isn't entirely true. some of it is embellished, and some of it may not have happened at all. now, for a nation of middle aged women, maybe that bothers them. but me, i'm a fiction reader. so even if this entire thing is ENTIRELY false, i'm still down with it. but some of it, there's no way it didn't happen to him on some scale. some of it is just too fierce.

i didn't underline any quotes or any passages to really pass along to you guys as a guide. it's written in a chuck-esque tone, but without those one liners that tear you down. it's just honest, and brutal. it's actually one of those books that makes sense to describe as 'raw.' this guy has no writing background, and it shows. he's just recounting his experience. and it works. the entire book just works. which is another reason i don't think it's entirely made up. things don't all wrap up nicely, and things don't really end SO badly... the experience just gets tied up. in fact, the most climactic moment in the entire book, in my experience, comes after the actual narrative is completed.

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sometimes i just want to strip my entire album collection down to just albums that need to be heard front to back. maybe just put the rest into storage. that kind of thing.

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i haven't been sleeping as well as i was.
i also stopped writing as much as i was.
i wonder if there is a direct relation.

antenna.

today is my first real day off since i started working again, it feels like. every other day that i've had no hours at a job, wedged between two other days that i DID have hours have been monopolized from morning til night. that's not a bad thing, necessarily. in fact, today is just like one of those days where i was unemployed forever. except today, i got to appreciate it, guilt free. i wasn't worrying or tap-tapping.

it finally felt like things were okay.
because they are.

a majority of today has already been spent plopped in front of my ps2 and television playing more god of war. I have been having such a good time with the game, exactly like i had with the first one. it's just one huge movie, essentially, that i get to help along. there are a few parts where i've died, literally, twenty or more times. stuff like that is frustrating, as in any video game. mostly, this kind of thing would come up in earlier NES games where the pits were placed just too far apart. or enemies just did NOT make sense in certain places for the skill level that your character was ready for at that time. but the BIGGEST thing that made games very difficult were the lack or sparse placement of save/check points. and that's what keeps this game on. the people in charge of god of war must have had very similar experiences with games, and have put markers after pretty much EVERY thing that you do. and that helps out a WHOLE lot. so, i've got the barbarian's hammer, the spear of destiny, and icarus' wings, i've spoken to the titan atlas, and have freed a phoenix from its ashen prison.

i'm down with that.

i also finally started to read a million little pieces by james frey.
there was such a HUGE hype behind this book due to the oprah machine, and that, to me, waters down a book SO much. it's like the whole davinci code thing. when that book was getting insane acclaim, and stayed on the best seller chart for who knows HOW long, i had to ignore it, just at least for the first chunk of that. there's just an element of tag-along that goes with those HUGE hype trains. like the wii right now. i'm sure that a lot of people who are looking forward to getting those hard-to-get wii systems are going to be selling them back within the year. not a majority, or anything, i don't think. but a good amount of people are going to be disappointed that they bought into the whole "grassy knoll" mentality. either way, the book's first twenty pages are legit. and while that can't necessarily mean the entire book is going to be good, so far it's exceeded my expectations.

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