My buddy Jason’s persian cat has its own blog. Normally, I’d decry people writing in character as their pets (serially) as awful, but Bumble the cat’s unhinged jihadist persona is special and joyous. So, go read Infidel Nation if only to see the unfolding saga of a cat’s one-sided war with the SyFy channel.

This weekend, I nearly died of hipsters. Luckily, I not awash in dismissive, smug conversations about Best Coast, Small Black, School of Seven Bells and Grizzly Bear and how Animal Collective and MGMT are ‘so over’.  It is probably good that music wasn’t a topic of conversation, because I’d have been taken down in a hail of skinny jeans, Salvation Army eyeglasses and ironic t-shirts.

I was celebrating friend Gerard’s birthday when it all happened. “I’m just warning you,” Natasha warned me, “Gerard’s friends are pretty hipsterish.”  But I was not prepared for the fashionably unwashed and forcibly ironic wave that washed over me when I answered the door to let them inside.

After being in close proximity to the hipsters for more time than a sane man could have stood, I don’t really think I hate them anymore. They’re all just kind of naive and anchorless, and I kind of identify with that. In fact, so many of them are disillusioned English majors. Was that me? I don’t think it was, but I knew them when I was their age.  There was a guy I knew in grad school who was one of them and I don’t remember his name but he was one of those people who is rude all the time because he has Great Thoughts about art and you don’t.  I personally can’t think of any art that is more important than the viewer, but that’s how I roll, I guess and that’s maybe the wrong way to roll up in the scholarhood.

A scene from the evening:

I retire to the living room and turn on Food Network. After awhile, I join Natasha and friend Michael out on the front porch. They both meander back inside as a clutch of hipsters comes outside to smoke ironically.  As they mill about, one of them, completely unaware that it was I who once sat in the living room, peers into the window and says:

HIPSTER: What loser is watching The Food Network?

Like Miranda Bailey, I stayed mum. Instead I watched Charlie die and now I feel guilty about not ever having liked him.

HIPSTER 2: I guess maybe if you aren’t paying attention to it, it’s good to watch. Like, ambient.

HIPSTER 3: Ooooh, CUPCAKE WARS!

Woman: I just want he to know that we’ve done work in their industry before.

Woman: (she to know)

Me: Her to know?

Woman: OK, LOL

So yesterday I made a comment about being biased against Dave Eggers in the comments of someone’s Google Reader item and BOOM – some total stranger swoops in like Batman and says “shut the fuck up Jeff.”

Whoa, right?

My first thought was that the commenter was Dave Eggers himself (who I’ve done a bit of a rollercoastery thing with: really liking him and respecting the mission statement of McSweeney’s – as a publishing enterprise and not as a pretty much one-joke humor website* – when I first became aware of it, but getting really sick of his incessant egoism very quickly, but then well what can you expect from an author who calls his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and spends a lot of time in said memoir talking about how he tried to ride Judd Winick’s coattails onto MTV because he wanted to be on MTV).  But I realized that ‘shut the fuck up jeff’ is not florid and verbose and packed to its gills with a manic plea to see how smart and fucking wordy I am so it couldn’t have been Dave Eggers because he’d have been all, “a comment that siphons ecstatic transport away from the reader with each syllable! Take it into the forest, tie it to a stump and cover your ears as the wood goblins devour it in all their capering majesty!” and I thought about writing a post where Dave Eggers (well, me writing like Dave Eggers), would comment in effusive and vocabulous ways on terrible things but my heart wasn’t really in it, you know, so I’m pulling back the curtain instead to tell you all about the blog post that I almost wrote but didn’t because a stranger was rude to me on the Internet. Besides, how upset can you really get over a dude on the Internet anyway? It’s the Internet after all, and the Internet is not really a place where you go to to have warm feelings about other human beings – warm human feelings are kind of a bonus, even more than they are in real life. It’s like Anonymous – sometimes, you look at them and they’re attacking a mentally ill guy or a twelve year old girl (and I know that Perry is going to be all up in the comments telling me that these people deserve to be attacked by 4chan because they are social poison) and you kind of expect that of them and you go, okay, maybe that’s a little funny but I hate myself for laughing, but then the rest of the time they’re discrediting Scientology or the tea party and you think that maybe you can use hate and misanthropy for social good sometimes. I think this is what makes the handful of legitimate friendships I’ve developed over time with Internet people pretty remarkable, because you kind of walk in the door expecting that everybody else out there is an unrepentant shithead but sometimes you realize that Yoda was right and that there is, in fact, still good in him. Or it.

EDIT: I should probably stop reading Pitchfork Reviews Reviews right before writing posts.

*And full disclosure here, I subscribed to McSweeney’s and Believer for a few years and probably would still read both of them if they weren’t so ungodly expensive. I mean, if Conde Nast can give me Bon Appetit for something like five cents and a wish per issue – and Bon App isn’t just food porn for me because I save those recipes and try to use them – I can’t justify forty-five dollars a year for ten issues of Believer even if the music issue is always really good.

So I’m looking at this terrible website for work, and it’s just a collection of spam links in list format. And they look something like this (all actual anchor text from the site)

PLAN A FUNERAL

GET A DIVORCE

BUY A MATTRESS

START YOUR OWN PERSONAL JEWELRY BUSINESS

I feel like this is a new roadmap for my life.

I splurged in commemoration of my birth and bought a nook from my local Barnes & Noble.

I’ve had it for four days. As a gadget, it feels good in my hand, is responsive, has a nice minimalistic design and a good user interface and its e-ink screen is incredibly crisp and readable. Because his was the first face to appear on the screensaver as it charged in my bedroom, I named the unit ‘vonnegut’.

It is a very fine gadget.

What I haven’t determined yet is whether or not it’s a gadget that I need.

I love gadgets. I’m not an early adopter and I rarely buy shiny things just to buy shiny things. There’s either an emotional component (like with the Dragon Quest PlayStation 2 controller I’ve got – it looks like a Slime for crying out loud, and what gamer doesn’t love those adorable little guys) or a utility component (a thousand songs in my pocket is pretty useful, even back when I couldn’t play Shining Force on my iPod).

I don’t really feel either of those things when I consider the nook. Why buy one? I keep hearing about how this is future and whatever. I don’t want to be late for the future.

Ultimately, I think the nook is a nice device. But I don’t know that I need it. And I’d say the same for the Kindle (and really, Kindle, crowing that you are smaller than ever is not a selling point for someone with giant ape-hands). It hasn’t saved my life and it hasn’t changed it irrevocably. It’s good at what it does, but what it does doesn’t fill a niche for me.

The main reason why?

I think the best gadget for reading stories in is probably still the book.

I am one year older than I was when last I posted.

Thirty-one was alright. I fell in love. Stopping right there, that’s a good year.

Despite being self-published, I managed to tell a comic book story I could put my name on, with the help of my talented friends.

I took on new job responsibilities.

These things don’t suck.

Here’s to thirty-two.

Kanye Interrupts Helmet Xzibit Being Stalked By A Velociraptor Mountains Pizza (feat. Spots Perkins)

Tune in next time on Deadliest Author for…NEAL STEPHENSON vs. DAN BROWN.

*”Otters gonna ott” is courtesy of Anna at Is This Tight?