Harktober.

october 9th, 2017

i cut off my bangs into a nice little choppy fringe this morning. It was liberating like it always is when i cut my hair. People sometimes talk about cutting your own hair like it's illegal. Like someone will call the cops on you. Or that you need to be an expert or have expert equipment. But you can just do it with child safety scissors in the bathroom on a whim.

Today my dad is giving a talk at my hometown high school about how he learned to read CAT scans from YouTube videos posted by some of the best internal medicine doctors in the country. my dad has reminded me that the internet is a library.

Fetishized expertise comes up in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when the narrator's travel buddy wants to take his motorcycle to a mechanic rather than learn how to fix it himself. And the reader is meant to agree with the narrator that o, isn't this tragic, what a bummer that the travel buddy alienates himself from his experience rather than learn to fix his own motorcycle like I, the narrator, do.

But then laced throughout the book are moments when the narrator is shitty to his young son. Which then made me wonder if the travel buddy's reluctance wasn't so much magical thinking about the expert caste of mechanics and more an attempt to set boundaries with his pushy friend the narrator.

i'm a third of the way through Dhalgren right now. Have you read Dhalgren? You should read Dhalgren. It's very good.

Most portraits of collapse of civilization look like dirty cannibalistic stress festivals, like Mad Max or The Road. But i think actual collapse of civilization and resource ultra‑scarcity won't be like The Road, it'll be like Dhalgren. People will share. We will share. We are mammals. That's what we were made to do.

Here's me singing I Can't Go for That at karaoke last week and flirting with my husband:

Photo by Nat