One hundred pages. (Well, one hundred and change.) Then I'm done.
Because I know that you, dear loyal reader, are biting your nails, wondering the night away: Will he make it?
Yes, I think I will: between a lunch hour snuck off to read a handful of pages, and the couple of hours I'll remain conscious before I pass out tomorrow night, I'll make it. And dammit, I'm still enjoying myself. And dammit, if someone came up to me tomorrow and said, "Hey, we just found a pre-1985 Steve Erickson novel! Wanna copy?", dammit if I wouldn't say, "Yes. Yes I do." And then I'd read it. Though I'm glad that won't happen. Me and Steve's Books, we've had a hell of a fling here, but we've come to an agreement that it's best for all parties if we go see other people and their books for a while. So that someday in the future, we can bump into each other on a lonely moon-lit sidewalk, completely unexpected of course, and then we can head in to a local bar to throw back a few drinks and remember the good old days of July 2005. Maybe, then, we'll make out a little bit, too. A little mind-expansion here, a little fooling around there, a little excess of literary fireworks up against the wall--for old times' sake. But that's for the future to decide.
So a hundred pages, and then: Chicago, for an absolutely ridiculous amount of indie-rawk carnage. Chicago and me, we get along, I think. And checking the weather reports, it's nice to see that I'll be escaping the torrid, sweat-drenched Cleveland heat for a while, replacing it with torrid, sweat-drenched Chicago heat. But see, it's Chicago heat, and that makes it special. (And hey, I hear if you don't like the weather there, just wait five minutes. It'll still be miserable but at least you got to use that five minutes line everyone digs.) Unfortunately, I don't think I'll have the chance to go one-on-one with Michael Jordan down at the park nor will I get to trade coaching truisms with Mike Ditka while I'm there, due largely to lack of available time, and the fact that it's not 1988.
A little something else for you, from the "Darby checks his search engine referrer logs way too much" department: at least as of right now, my incisive, cutting critique of Steve Erickson's Our Ecstatic Days is on the first page of hits on "our ecstatic days" on Google. I'm right up there with the Believer and Bookforum and other greats of the greats, which obviously means that what we've known all along is now official: I'm great! So, you know, if you're joining me from that route, welcome, make yourself at home, but not for too long, because you should really go read the book, since you're obviously interested enough to click any old damn link you find on the topic.
Also, I'm the number one hit on Google for "footnote technology", which, er, makes me greater, I guess.
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