Kids, if I haven't been writing, it's because I haven't been reading. I've picked up and put down more books in the last month than I have in the previous mumble mrnrmms. That includes both Blood Meridian and Our Mutual Friend, two books that I'd picked up and put down sometime in the last decade, both of which I picked back up in the last month, thinking maybe they'd actually work for me this time. Neither did. Though I did make it about ten pages past the points I'd originally abandoned them. At this rate, woo, some day, maybe. I've also set down A Game of Thrones, which I picked up, thinking, maybe what I need are some dragons and kick-ass sword fights and, like, elf chicks, or something? And then I got 250 pages into the book and I find out all the dragons are extinct, I guess, and there's no Liv Tyler to be found in a thousand miles? I mean, not that the book is bad--I'm generously telling myself I'm only pausing on this book rather than quitting it--but, still, I mean, no dragons. Just a bunch of assholes being political toward each other. No thanks, CNN, I will not engage with you for my light entertainment needs. So then yesterday I started reading The Mysteries of Pittsburgh because I like Michael Chabon a good deal and because maybe I needed to forget about big books for a while (did I mention I tried to read Ada, or Ardor by Nabokov on an empty brain and physically died 20 pages in?) and Pittsburgh comes from the area of the To Be Read piles that my girlfriend has dubbed "the cute little books" section, so, win, right? And it's been going alright--"Yes," I tell myself, "what I do need right now is an old-fashioned tale told by a horny young man who is trying to figure life and girls out but mostly girls of the manic pixie variety, because they are dreamy and mysterious and life is genuinely an interesting thing"--and I've been floating along okay but I just hit some dogs fucking, and it's like, really, Little Tiny Baby Michael Chabon? Dogs? Fucking? I don't know. Heartfelt sigh.

So, you see, I'm at a loss. They don't grow doctors who can look inside you and fix the part of you that's broken your ability to read, and I'm sure my insurance wouldn't cover that option anyway, so I'm stuck. And I'm wondering if the Internet knows what to do, how to literally flush out your brain in such a way that you want to actually start using it again, in a concentrated long-term no-blinky-blinky-lights sort of way, because all these hours spent watching episodes of the original Star Trek series (which is both as cheesy and far better than I remember it being) and playing Fallout 3 (which really does kick a lot of ass, actually) don't seem to be doing it. Should I eat more soup? Is soup good for this? I can't eat more soup. The soup train is full. Tremble.